Did you ever see The Big Chill? It’s a seminal ’80s Boomer movie[1] about college friends who reunite for a weekend in the woods to commemorate their other friend who committed suicide. Along the way, they enjoy the soundtrack but are otherwise I think mostly shitty to each other? Who can remember.

Anyway, 30 Miles from Nowhere is pretty much the horror movie version of that. Yes, college friends, yes, shitty to each other, yes, a suicide, yes, a cabin in the woods… but now with bonus “is it a haunting, or a vampire, or creepy backwoods folk, or just jumpy city folk, or what?” going on.[2]

iMDB would have me believe this was a horror comedy, but I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between that and the kind of horror movie that has tension-breaking comedic scenes, and that this falls on the not-a-comedy side of that line. I mention this partly to pad out the review, but mostly because I think “comedy” gets thrown around way too often if a movie happens to be funny in some scenes. Nah, man. Dramas can be scary, horror movies can be funny, comedies can have sad montages, and none of it means that every movie is a crossover hybrid of multiple types.

Be reductive, that’s my motto.

[1] with honestly not much to recommend it aside from an outstanding soundtrack
[2] Plus no soundtrack worth much of anything, but that would have been maybe too unfair to the original, so.