A bunch of college kids spend the night in the woods. Of course there's going to be bloodshed.

Triggered is a horror movie whose premise takes precedence over logic and characterization. Nine friends from high school reunite to go camping in the woods. There's Rian, the brainy one; PJ, her musician boyfriend; Ezra, the douchebag; and there's Kato, Erin, Amber, Bobby, Cici, and Shea, none of whom I'm able to provide with shorthand descriptors.

In the middle of the night, their old high school science teacher knocks them out with sleeping gas. He locks them in suicide vests with timers set to various durations. When the gang wakes up, he spouts a vague diatribe at them and shoots himself in the head.

The vests are set to explode when the timer runs out. They learn this the hard way, when Bobby's timer runs out first. There's one other part of the game that the teacher left unexplained: if they kill each other, the killer inherits the victim's remaining time. They figure it out after PJ kills Shea by accident.

Cue a whole lot of running around in the woods with very little sense of time or place. The friends split into smaller factions, alternately working together and conspiring against each other. As their numbers dwindle, the survivors manage to figure out why all this nonsense is happening. Their science teacher suspected one of them of killing his son. Instead of narrowing it down to a specific suspect, he decided to go straight to the nuclear option. He must have been super confident in his handiwork, since he killed himself before the vests' devices even finished booting. It had already been established that Rian went to MIT. If her keychain had come with a screwdriver, his whole plan might have gone down the toilet.

The Saw franchise requires some high-altitude suspension of disbelief, but its plots are as consistent as simple arithmetic compared to Triggered. If Shea hadn't died by happenstance, they never would have known they could steal each other's time. They immediately devolve into a free-for-all under the guileless assumption that the last person's vest won't blow up regardless. The movie's store-brand Jigsaw leaves a lot to be desired. He was smart enough to build bombs that detect their owner's death and use geolocation to update each other's timers, but dumb enough to make it possible for the lone survivor to be his son's killer. That's a lot of hard work just to leave the worst possible outcome on the table. As is often the case with high-concept, low-budget horror flicks, there's more concern for making the twists unexpected than plausible.

The script has some of the cheesiest dialogue I've ever heard. In the middle of a fight to the death, PJ tells another character, "I knew you were a psycho when you didn't cry at the end of Terminator 2." Ezra says about another character's injuries, "He's crashing harder than Bitcoin." Kato tells one of his victims, "I'm not soft. I'm as hard as a priest in a playground." Occasionally I grinned. Mostly I groaned.

If you like a few chuckles with your gore, Triggered might fit the bill. If you find yourself rolling your eyes a lot, don't say I didn't warn you. For a better example of campy horror, I recommend Murder Party.

5 out of 10.

Seen on Hulu.