A quick review of a bad low budget horror movie...
The story: Cheerleaders Tara and Jenna are on their way to Minneapolis to complete in a cheerleading competition. When they stop for gas they meet a couple guys dealing with car trouble and eager to catch a ride back to the city. However the four of them will be taken captives by backwoods psychos intent on torturing them unless they are escape.
So it's kind of a low (no?) budget version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Hills Have Eyes or Hostel or any number of others people-captured-torture-escape movies. And for what it is it isn't bad. What works is the way things play out in the beginning: the girls encounter two guys with car trouble, they give them a ride, they are attacked by another maniac in a car, they get taken hostage...it all plays out pretty well. They seem to avoid a lot of the things that make these movies so bad -- terrible dialog, rediculous plotting, horrible special effects, lousy camerawork, etc -- to the point where about twenty minutes in you might be thinking the movie will end up being pretty good. But it isn't.
So what happens? Well, nothing. I mean, sure they get taken captive and people are tortured and they try to escape and there's yelling and crying and struggling, etc, etc. But so what? We've seen all that before. They can't really think a story about people taken captive and tortured is going to be interesting anymore? Where's the twist? Where's that cool thing?
And that's the problem. While the movie does a decent job getting into the second act, it is just like any other capture-torure-escape movie. There's nothing interesting or unique going on here. So after thrity minutes of seen-this-before, you get bored. And then the last thirty minutes are painful, not because they are doing anything extreme with the horror aspect, but just because it is soooo seen-it-before.
Any time you make a movie you should have an idea of what you are going to do that's different. What's new? It can be something in a relationship. It can be a different spin to an old story. It can be mashing two genres together. It can be a point of view, the idea you are using the story to say something those stories don't usually say. It can be anything. But you need something new.
The one bizarre choice that almost saved the movie (as camp), or almost killed it completely (as a serious horro movie) is the bizarre choice of casting. For some reason, even though the characters are supposed to be American and it's supposed to take place in Minnesota, all the characters talk with a Swedish accent. It is either the most stupid thing I have ever seen or it is almost the funniest thing in the history of film. I can't decide which. Anyway...
*** AVOID ***
Low budget horro to recommend instead: Evil Dead, Dead Alive, Basket Case, Cube, and of course the great George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment