This is a real treat for me, folks–the crew out at Anchor Bay sent over a copy of Bereavement for me to review, and this is out to be a slasher movie on par with any other. Will it manage to outdo the others? Or will the followup to Malevolence prove to not be a match for the rest of the field.

Bereavement takes us back to 1989–more on that in a minute–where a six year old boy has just been abducted by a stranger. The stranger in question is a serial killer with a taste for teenage girls. But then, why take a six year old boy? Simple…the six year old is set to be the serial killer’s protege, and as such, the killer teaches the boy everything he knows over the span of the next five years. Meanwhile, a teenage girl whose parents have recently died arrives at her uncle’s farm, where she discovers the now eleven year old boy and the serial killer who’s been training him to murder. But will the girl survive her discovery? Or will she live only long enough to regret it?

Yes, that’s right: Bereavement is no sequel, it’s a prequel to one of the better slasher movies you’ll see of late, Malevolence. Sadly, Bereavement can’t keep up, especially in the early goings as most of the time it’s either screaming from captive girls or horrifyingly glib bits of serial killer logic, which as we all know from watching horror movies, tends to only make sense to serial killers.

In fact, there’s a lot of strange stuff going on here, and a lot of it is rather creepy as opposed to scary. Serial killer logic fades in and out, watching a ten year old get trained to be a serial killer is preposterous and horrifying, bu tat the same time, we know what this is setting up. And that’s what Bereavement is all about: setting up. So if you’re bored to tears by this, as I was for most of it (not to mention gravely disappointed by it all), then just remember, all this is going toward getting all the ducks in the row for Malevolence. Oh, sure, the ending will be packed with killing and mayhem, but this almost feels tacked on by comparison. The rest of the movie had virtually nothing scary to it. Anything that might have been scary was too glib to bother with and felt more like torture porn than anything.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Bereavement a six out of ten, not so much for what it is, rather for what it represents. This is the start of something much larger and much more impressive, so viewed in that light, Anchor Bay’s got a winner here. But aside from that, it’s nowhere near as good as its predecessor.