Blackburn is your usual middle of nowhere kind of horror plot, a group of teens find themselves trapped between a forest fire and a hard place, the hard place being a rock slide. Trying to find a place to spend the night, the five friends enter an abandoned mine where they think a couple, who they saw a few hours previous, are possibly staying. Inside the group are hunted down by three former inmates of an insane asylum who aren't to happy about having guests.
I mentioned the Wrong Turn Sequels earlier for a reason, and that reason is Blackburn has that wrong turn deformed hillbillies kind of edge to it. Difference between the two films? the Wrong Turn films pull it off very well, with a much better story arch. Blackburn unfortunately does not. We are given a cast of characters you couldn't give two hoots about, a setting which seems familiarly like the mine scenes from Until Dawn, and a paper thin story which loses momentum halfway though the film. It is full to the brim with the usual horror cliches, for example we get the two couples where two of the opposite sex of each couple is sleeping with each other, they get caught then one dies. The problem with this film is that there seems to be hardly any care from the hurt party. Why isn't our lead more pissed off? but hey ho this is just a tiny problem in a whole ball of problems.
Positives? this isn't one of the worst slasher films out there and, knowing the lower budget horror films of recent time, you will be seeing this either on Netflix or in HMV for £6.99 pretty quickly. There is a chance the more forgiving horror fans, the ones who like a more cheese covered stab and go style of film, will enjoy this. I mean hell if the characters and story were more polished this would have had a lot of potential for a few films, but to be honest I couldn't care less about the five teens, I didn't give a crap about the back story of the killers and I just found myself getting annoyed at the lack of any emotion of the final girl, especially in the final scene.
Wait till the bargain bin for this one horror fans.