Horror Movie Review: The Windmill Massacre (2016)

The Windmill Massacre is a 2016 slasher/supernatural horror movie written & directed by Nick Jongerius. The movie stars Charlotte Beaumont, Ben Batt, Fiona Hampton, Noah Taylor & Adam Thomas Wright.

Jennifer (Beaumont) is on the run from Australia & currently posing as a nanny in Amsterdam. Her cover is blown when the father of the child in her care discovers her Australian passport with her real name on it. She fights him off & escapes out of the house. In an attempt to lose the police she boards a coach loaded up with tourists. A group about to embark on a tour of Holland’s world famous windmills.

The bus ends up breaking down on the side of a road where the mud underneath sees it slip into a lake. The group are forced to take refuge in a shed that sits near an supposedly abandoned windmill. A spooky looking place that wasn’t part of the tour. Why? Well, this particular windmill comes with a story.

Supposedly run by a miller who worshipped the Devil, he took people from the local village & used the machinery inside to grind their bones into dust. The miller is long dead though, right?

It’s not long before the group end up being picked off one by one. The first kill coming quite soon after they step off the bus. This comes as a surprise & is the one & only shock of the film. The Windmill Massacre follows a tried & tested formula within the slasher sub-genre with the only real highlight being the gory violence.

The characters are bland & their motivations to be on this tour, sketchy at best. They all have something in common which is revealed in the final third to half-hearted shrugs. It’s just no-one forced them onto the coach, they all chose to go on a tour of Holland’s windmills. Other then Charlotte Beaumont most of the cast just don’t have that much to work with. but However most still pull decent performances out of their bare-bone backstories.

Stupid decisions, going off alone & arguing constantly over the same thing bog down an idea that is stretched to breaking point by the end. The final third of the movie is dedicated to defeating the miller once & for all which a couple of surviving characters manage to do only for it to be negated in the very next scene.

Sure, it’s got a nice gory visual death but it just makes you go, huh? What was the point of all that?

The Windmill Massacre is entertaining enough. It’s just not a movie that you’re likely to remember a week after you watched it. Worth checking out for the gore & semi-original story.