From 1985, right in the middle of the decade of the slasher flick, comes a joint UK/Swedish production titled Blood Tracks. Directed by Mats Helge Olsson and Derek Ford, from a screenplay by Olsson and Anna Wolf, Blood Tracks follows a small film crew, a hair rock band, and some scantily clad dancers, who all head up into some snowy mountains to shoot a music video. But, as would happen, they become stranded by an avalanche, while a crazed family of hermits hunts them down in bloody fashion. This isn’t a franchise slasher, or one of the countless American entries, but it is a prototypical example of the genre, wallowing in the conventions and tropes that have done so much to make these flicks successful.
Even more, this flick stars a real, honest to goodness hair band in Swedish group Easy Action, here portraying a band named Solid Gold.
The plan is to only stay in the area for a day or two, getting shots of the band miming with a snowy background, while the dancers freeze half to death in outfits that would be too scandalous for an Italian beach. There’s also an abandoned factory nearby that the video’s director, Bob (Michael Fitzpatrick) wants to use for some cool industrial shots. The problem is, as any urban explorer can affirm, there is no such thing as an abandoned building.
Inside live a mother (Filippa Silverstone) and a gaggle of her feral sons. As seen in the movie’s introduction, she took her children and fled society after killing her abusive husband. The killing was in self-defense, but we all know sometimes that doesn’t matter in the eyes of the law. 
How they ended up hiding out in the factory isn’t explained, but that doesn’t matter. They are there, have been there long enough for the boys to grow into crazed adults, in fact, and over on the adjacent property is a cabin full of fodder.
The film takes a while to get to the killing, but the filmmakers make up for that by feeding viewers some gratuitous nudity. According to the internet, so it must be true, the members of Easy Action were nervous about being in a movie. But, being the rock stars that they were, they look quite comfortable in the scenes where they’re drinking booze and sleeping with the dancers.
Meanwhile, it’s left up to the technical members of the film crew, that is, the professional actors playing the director, sound guy, cinematographer, etc., to carry the film. It is they who wander into unsafe places, who try to go for help, who make the inevitable suggestions to ‘split up.’ It’s all very boilerplate.
There are decent kills to be had. The most spectacular include impalement, decapitation, strangulation, and bisection, all nice and bloody. In other death scenes, Olsson, Ford, and company pull back, almost as if they were husbanding scant resources for the big kills.
Blood Tracks is not a great film. It’s the very definition of mediocre, in fact. There is no great standout performance, and plenty of amateurish ones. The pace is uneven, with the film being too heavily backloaded, and it’s nothing horror veterans will not have seen before. But, it does have some charm. It’s a reminder of just how kitschy rock could be at the time, for one thing. Combining hair bands and slashers is a sublime idea, just one that was lacking in Olsson and Ford’s execution.
While watching is a middling experience from a critical perspective, it’s a decent shitty movie watch. Vinegar Syndrome sure thought so, as they restored and released the film on Blu-ray. The first act is a drag on watchability, but things do pick up, and watching the band try and act can be funny. It slots into the #317 spot in the Index, displacing Mindkiller.