Dimension Extreme has always been a friend to the horror community.  They wrangle some interesting films from the good old US of A, such as The Wizard of Gore remake, and a handful of foreign films worthy of note.  Dead in 3 Days (In 3 Tagen Bist Du Tot, for purists) falls into the latter category.  An Austrian horror film originally released in its native country in 2006, it finally made its way to the States on the heels of the sequel’s release in Europe.  

Dead in 3 Days begins with the image of a young girl, bloodied and terrified, running through the woods to a stretch of road, where she is found by a police officer.  As he tends to her, she whispers that he must help Nina.  Flash back four days, and we meet this girl and the subject of her pleas, Nina.  Nina (Sabrina Reiter) and her friends, including boyfriend Martin (Laurence Rupp), couple-friends Clemens and Alex (Michael Steinocher and Nadja Vogel) and fifth wheel Mona (Julia Rosa Stockl), are graduating and taking the leap towards adulthood.  Their fun is dampened when they each receive a text message stating, “You Will Be Dead in 3 Days.”  If you’re of the type that claps when you hear the movie title mentioned in the movie, you’re going to have a blast during this sequence.

At a club, Martin goes missing and soon the local police are involved, but der Scooby Gang thinks they may have a culprit in the creepy dark-haired dude with whom they graduated.  However, there is a darker secret lurking in their past which will be revealed as the real reason someone is stalking them, killing them one by one.  As the movie begins to focus more on Nina, more of the post-graduate teens are knocked off, all on the way to the final moments when the killer and the friends’ past merge.

Not being a fan of the slasher film as a rule, I do find that there are occasional forays that I find entertaining, such as Cold Prey and the downright brilliant Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.  Dead in 3 Days does not have the cleverness or the style to stack up favorably against these titles.  Sure, there is technical competence displayed by director Andreas Prochaska, and he moves the camera with some style and puts together some very compelling shots.  Aside from the darkness of the movie, and I don’t mean tone, here, I mean how hard this movie is to see, at times, it’s a pretty movie to view.  

What drags this movie down is the lack of any character that you could begin to care

about.   The kills are okay, if that’s what you’re in it for, but the pacing of the film is so molasses-slow in between them, I found myself wondering if I could get my hands on a paddleball these days, or has technology done away with such simple pleasures?  Surely not.  I’m sure a trip to Toys’R’Us would produce one, maybe even a set of jacks in the old netting like they used to come in.  That’s the sort of mental meandering that happened during this movie, and that, for a horror film, is unforgivable.

I know there are fans of slashers, and there will always be movies to sate the fans’ need for seeing a group of teenagers hacked up due to some psycho with an agenda, but Dead in 3 Days brings nothing new to the table, aside from a different language.  It’s as rote as I Know What You Did Last Summer, ending on more of an explanation than a twist.  As for me, I was just happy to see the credits roll finally, even if it was to yet another of the film’s American-voiced semi-pop metal tunes.  There are better ways to spend your time than with this by-the-numbers import that only manages to add another patch of earth to the list of those producing mediocre slasher pics.