Movie House Massacre (1984)

FEBRUARY 27, 2013

GENRE: CRAP, SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

With only a month or so left, I'm afraid I will have gone through six years of HMADing without finding a single really good horror movie set inside a movie theater (I saw Demons when I was like 15 or something, so it doesn't count). A couple have been OK (Popcorn, Anguish, Midnight Movie), but I had major problems with them - they're just a lot better than the rest: Last Screening, Dead At The Box Office, Midnight Matinee, Nightmare In Blood... the list goes on, and I walked away severely disappointed with them all. And perhaps needless to say, Movie House Massacre (aka Blood Theatre) is no better; in fact it may be the worst of the lot.

But to be fair I kind of expected that, since the film was directed by Rick Sloane, whose film Hobgoblins served as the fodder for one of the better Syfy era episodes of MST3k. Sloane took quite a beating on that one (more than most of the filmmakers in episodes I've seen, in fact), and rightfully so - he's a pretty tone-deaf and terrible director, and here he doesn't even have the benefit of goofy puppets causing chaos. Instead he just has some cheap ghost FX wrapped in what is otherwise a sort-of slasher plot where the staff of a theater that's about to open is getting picked off one by one. There's no mystery to the killer's identity - he's the now ancient manager of the place from the 1930's, when it was a live performance theatre (we see this in the film's prologue, which is also its best sequence by far).

So the plot is typical slasher stuff - what's the problem? Sloane's incompetency, that's what. As the film's writer, producer, director, editor, and cinematographer, there is no question on who is to blame for this nonsense, and no he can't use his budget as an excuse - he's got the location (production value) covered, and while there isn't a single noticeable shot in the entire thing, I've certainly seen worse cinematography. But it's so damn inert that none of it matters - there's a shocking lack of tension or even cohesion from start to finish - and I do mean "finish" as in the very last shot, which shows two cops we've never seen before entering the theater, and then a freeze-frame as we go to credits. And that's not even the most confusing part - early on we see a big crowd for a showing, but then the rest of the movie is about how the theater hasn't even opened yet? The manager leaves for awhile only to be beat up (without seeing any hits) by some random dudes who were either taking down or putting up a sign for a theater-owner convention before he arrived. Later he comes back and offers no explanation for his attack, nor does anyone ask him about it. It almost seems like at one point his disappearance was supposed to be a way for us to think he might be the killer, but we've already seen him several times at that point so that doesn't work.

But that's just one of the many things about this movie that often made me wonder if I was watching the deleted scenes instead of the feature. Passage of time, the location of characters in relation to another... all of these things remain unclear throughout. It took more than half of the movie for me to even understand that the manager's office wasn't located at the movie theater, though it's not my fault - at one point his secretary takes a phone call and walks down to get him INSIDE the theater, so the idea that they're in two locations must have been a decision that came later. Most of the movie consists of people answering phones, walking down hallways, or doors shutting, which is probably for the best when you consider how terrible all of the actors are (one of them is completely redubbed, for whatever reason), so whatever keeps them from reciting Sloane's oft-painfully unfunny dialogue is a good thing.

Oh, yeah, it's supposed to be funny, I guess. The goofy circus-esque music and occasional sound FX are strong hints, as are the bulk of the kills - folks crisping up inside popcorn machines and the like. It's just as inept as a comedy as it is a horror movie - the tone and beats are so off it's mostly just my own optimism convincing me that anything that appeared to be a joke was intentional and not just further incompetence from Sloane. Basically just take the dumbest porno you've ever seen, remove all the sex, toss in a couple of cheapo murder scenes (there's a decapitation that might as well have given simultaneous on-screen credit to whoever assembled the dummy), and you still have a better movie than this. Just rubbish that even the most nostalgic slasher fan couldn't possibly defend.

The movie has three others on the disc; one I've seen (Matthew aka Scream Bloody Murder) and the other two are on the "B side" which scares me into thinking they're actually not as "good" as these (I kind of like Matthew, though it's hardly a classic). Maybe I'll give one a try and just shut it off if it's terrible. You guys shouldn't be dealing with "Crap" entries in these final weeks, and nor should I!

What say you?

P.S. The theater it was shot at has since been turned down. I like to think the owner was embarrassed about possibly being associated with it. It is now a bank.

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I Am The Ripper (2004)

FEBRUARY 18, 2013

GENRE: SLASHER, SUPERNATURAL, WEIRD
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

As horrible as I Am The Ripper was, I got through it armed with the knowledge that it will most likely be the last time I force myself to watch such a terrible movie. With only about six weeks left (sorry!) at HMAD I find myself being choosier, and with lots of Hollywood stuff and review discs on the way I should more or less be covered and thus not have to dig deep into Netflix when I'm between disc rentals. So grats, I Am The Ripper - barring unforeseen circumstances or Evil Dead somehow being a disaster, you'll be the last movie that makes me regret doing this!

And since it was just added to Instant, it'll probably be there for a while, so if you're compelled to ask "Why are you quitting?", just go watch any five minute chunk of this thing and then see if you still don't understand why I'd like to not spend more of my life watching this sort of rubbish. See, I've only ever shut off one movie in HMAD history, and it's something that I don't want to repeat - that bar has been set and thus I have to ask myself "Is this worse than that?" (I'll keep the title to myself, thanks - trust me, it's nothing you've even heard of anyway). And if the answer is no, and it always is, I press on - and besides, by the time I realize there's no hope for the movie I've already spent 30-40 minutes on it, so I might as well just finish it and not let my effort be in vain, since I'd still have to watch something else anyway.

So what makes this such a horrid disaster? Mostly everything. It took a mere 30 seconds for me to get worried, as the low-grade camera was zooming in and out, jerking around, etc as it depicted a brash guy telling his friend that he should be able to get laid more often than he does. After a bit of this they arrive at their destination: a house party filled with what appears to be the drunken members of the local university's film program. Two guys argue about Alien vs. Predator, a girl tells a guy about Tales from the Crypt, another recaps a Dolph Lundgren movie... that plus the apartment is adorned with posters for such classics as 13th Warrior and Pearl Harbor. And this whole time, the camera keeps spinning around and zooming in and out of people's faces before speed-ramping over to another conversation. It's clear that writer/director François Gaillard watched the party scene from Irreversible about 49 times and thought "Yeah, I can do that", but honestly I'd rather watch that grueling rape scene for 3 hours straight before submitting myself to a single moment of this movie again.

Anyway, things start to improve a few minutes later when a skull-masked killer shows up and dispatches one of the guests. I don't know if it could be done, but it would be interesting to see someone attempt a slasher movie set entirely in a cramped apartment party (sort of like the finale of Entrance, but for a whole movie), which is what I thought this was going to be. However, he wipes out most of the guests pretty quickly, and then the movie's real plot of warring angels begins - the survivor of the massacre is invited to a wrestling match with Death and gets 24 hours to prepare, only to get sucked into some sort of hell on earth nonsense that provides an excuse for endless shooutouts and hand-to-hand combat sequences cribbed from a 3rd rate Matrix ripoff circa 2002. I will admit, some of the stunt work is actually impressive considering the film's micro-budget, but it's wasted on Gaillard's hyperactive camera and incoherent script - at no point did I ever have a clear idea of why anyone was fighting or what they wanted to accomplish. Plus, they all keep shooting at each other even though it seems that bullets can't harm them (they're all angels of death or whatever the hell), rendering the scenes pointless along with confusing and ugly.

By the time the movie stopped cold to re-explain what was actually one of the few coherent plot points in the entire movie (that Death had challenged him to a wrestling match - I said coherent, not "intelligent"), I gave up all hope, which was unfortunate as there was still another 50 minutes to go. More unnecessary, stakes-free battles, amateurish dialogue/acting, nonsensical plot turns (at one point there's a hooded figure battling in a forest, which is either a flashback or a dream - even for this movie that one threw me for a loop), and hideous cinematography awaited! Fuck, even the goddamn credits were confusing, with a bunch of names tossed together haphazardly and no indication of who they played, plus a few where it seems that they didn't have the first (or last?) name.

Now, to be fair, Gaillard was clearly aiming at something really complicated and with a lot of mythology; at times it felt like the overstuffed attempt at adapting a lengthy video game or comic series (Hellblazer may have been an influence as well), and I like that he used a typical slasher to springboard into something far more elaborate. But it's just too much to ask an audience to try to follow all of this stuff as the camera spins and zooms around in a manner that might make the Crank guys sick, and with every plot scene raced through in order to get to the next John Woo wannabe gunfight (there are at least 3 Mexican standoff scenes). There's a chance this might be an interesting movie, but it needs a budget, a great script, and a skilled filmmaker to pull it off - otherwise it's just, well, the mess that it is. If Gaillard was a 13 year old with a lot of gusto, then kudos to him for getting the movie finished, otherwise this is a bit embarrassing even by no-budget standards - those Decrepit Crypt movies were just as shoddy but at least I could follow the damn things without getting a headache. Jesus, what a nightmare.

I now propose the same challenge I offered my Twitter followers - load it up on Netflix (or Amazon Prime) and see how far you can make it before wanting to shut it off. Did I mention it has freeze-frames to introduce characters?

What say you?

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The Summer Of The Massacre (2006)

JULY 23, 2012

GENRE: BREAKDOWN, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

There’s a movie called The Summer Of Massacre that supposedly has the world record for on-screen kills in a horror movie, and that’s what I thought I was renting. Instead, I got The Summer Of The Massacre, which adds a “The” but takes away about 150 deaths and, I can only hope, production value. Adding insult to injury, I actually OWN this damn movie already, as its included in the Decrepit Crypt set, which I “retired” due to the fact that the movies were all awful.

Unsurprisingly, Massacre is no exception. It’s laughably cheap, poorly directed/edited/acted/written, and is so blatant with its copying of Texas Chainsaw Massacre that it even copies some of its opening narration word for word from the mouth of John Larroquette. In fact I taped that part off the screen for your enjoyment (it goes very fast, might want to freeze frame so you can enjoy all of the typos and grammatical errors):

And that was as good as it got. Thus, same as it was for most of the other Decrepit Crypt movies I’ve watched, I spent most of the runtime wondering if I should just quit HMAD on the spot rather than finish it, because watching it served no purpose. I’ve already said everything I possibly can about this sort of crap, and now I even have people ragging on me for watching movies like this when I have so many titles on the recommendation thread I may never get to. So it’s not even worth watching for YOUR amusement!

For what it’s worth, the PRECISE reason this movie is a failure is the fact that it’s not really a movie, but a series of identical sequences strung together. Once our group of obnoxious young heroes go through the motions (traveling somewhere remote, getting lost, breaking down), there is no discernible difference to the rest of the movie – one of them goes off, encounters the killer (Hammer Head), runs around screaming as he grunts in pursuit, followed by a clumsily staged fight where every blow is off-screen, more running/screaming/grunting, followed – at long last – by their death. Then it starts over again. These scenes feature no dialogue beyond things like “NO!” and “Oh god!” or whatever, and the lack of any sort of actual prosthetic/makeup appliance means there’s never a good kill to at least make up for the tedium that preceded it. Hell after a while I began to wish that the director had opted for some cheap/bad CGI just to spice things up a little.

Also, the killer is the lamest in memory. He’s got a cheap mask on and wears a tie/shirt for some reason, and his weapon is a tiny little mallet that would fit in the top tray of your toolbox. His entire function in the movie is to run around grunting as he chased after his victims, all of whom manage to get away from him at least once (because if he did them in quickly, the movie would be even shorter than its 76 minute runtime), but that’s not even the main problem. If you notice, the Chainsaw films always have Leatherface as part of a family – that’s because by himself he’s boring, another generic mute killer. Apparently director Bryn Hammond didn’t pick up on that, so one of the few things he DOESN’T copy directly from Tobe Hooper (or Jeff Burr, or even Kim Henkel) ironically makes his movie even worse. Here he is getting stabbed by corn:

And here’s the kicker – this movie can be bought on its own for 15 dollars on Amazon. As shitty as it is, at least if it was confined solely to the Decrepit Crypt set I could shrug it off; the consumer is paying about 20 cents a movie, and thus the filmmakers are probably being compensated with pennies, identical to the ones they used to make their movies in the first place (as with others, this had no discernible budget – non-actors, consumer grade camera, sound seemingly recorded with the camera mic instead of separately, no sets, etc), and they should be happy that their movie got that much of a release. But as a consumer, I can’t condone the idea of slapping a professional cover on this nonsense and charging full price like it was a real movie – I can get a Blu-ray of The Dark Knight cheaper, in fact! You can and should watch better movies for free on Youtube.

In short, sorry for wasting your time by reviewing yet another terrible movie no one in their right mind would ever want to watch anyway.

What say you?

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Rift (2011)

JUNE 14, 2012

GENRE: CRAP, GHOST, SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

I was on the fence for whether or not to dub Rift as Crap, as I’ve mostly retired that scarlet letter out of shame (I overused it in my first year, I now realize). So I have to be really selective to give it its power, and spend time thinking about those other awful movies while wondering “is it AS bad as these?”. I honestly wasn’t sure, but then I went on its IMDb page and saw that all but ONE user review was a fake (all posted the same day), so that sealed the deal. Not that the IMDb is some pristine site that doesn’t deserve to be desecrated with false reviews, but they clearly knew that they made a terrible movie or else they wouldn’t have to go overboard with lies. So I’m basically just agreeing with them.

Featuring one of the most needlessly convoluted structures I’ve seen in some time, the movie ostensibly tells the story of a would-be journalist investigating the deaths of a bunch of young folks a decade earlier. So we have present day scenes of her in procedural/crime thriller mode, and flashbacks to what’s basically a slasher movie as these kids wander around their dorm and get picked off one by one. Fine, but then they add in some cops, full-screen footage of the movies the kids are watching, flashbacks to a hooker engaging in a rape scenario, the ghost (?) of a morgue attendant/necrophiliac… the movie is so padded out with nonsense, I actually had trouble discerning what was the real movie and what was the shit they threw in to make a 90 minute run time. At one point or another it seems I could have added every single sub-genre I have to the list: zombies, possession, psychological…

Hell, I even rewatched a chunk of the film, assuming I had missed the cypher that would tie all of this together. And maybe on the page it DID all make sense, but the movie is so poorly edited and directed (by the same guy who wrote it, Lazrael Lison) that it’s impossible to follow along without taking notes. There are so many go nowhere scenes, such as when the journalist is bothered by her little sister to come along, only to never be seen again. And for the life of me I can’t figure out what is taking the journalist so long – she’s seemingly in this dorm (and a makeshift photo lab) for a MONTH as she pieces together the story of what happened over the course of two nights? Does she go home in between? Why is it taking so long?

It doesn’t help that the acting is uniformly atrocious, with the main blond girl in the 2001 scenes (character’s name is Haili) being particularly terrible. As my wife pointed out, her acting (and indeed, most of the scare scenes) seemed like something you’d see on one of the early episodes of VH-1’s Scream Queens, before they had narrowed it down to the 2-3 people who were decent enough to net bit parts in a Saw sequel. This girl would have been one of the first to go if not for the fact that she was attractive, which would net her a couple episodes’ worth of leeway. The Eric Stoltz-y looking nerd character also drove me up a wall; I couldn’t tell if the character was supposed to be mentally disabled or if the “actor” was just that awkward with his line readings.

Unsurprisingly, the few actors you’ve heard of barely appear. Richmond Arquette and Tom Wright (the hitcher from Creepshow 2!) play the cops, who have a heart to heart about Wright’s lacking sex life before deciding how to get the rest of their donuts to the police station – since the entire movie is in flashback I’d like to know why our fearless journalist thought to include this in her story. And Leslie Easterbrook pops up in the final 10 minutes as the woman with all the “answers”, though her odd dialect (and the disc’s lack of subtitles) made much of her exposition a bit part to follow, so that’s another bone-headed move on their part. But at least these folks have screen presence and know how to deliver a line, so there’s maybe 8 or 9 total minutes of the movie where you can look at the screen and say “Hey all right, someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.”

Hilariously, it even has annoyances and mistakes where they’re not expected. The production companies include “Gjenius” productions, which I HOPE is just an attempt at a joke, and inexplicably has a production logo from the film’s composer, who is the first to be credited (despite a full roster of the crew at the top, the cast isn’t listed until the end). And the ending on-screen text (because, of course, this is “based on true events”) misspells the main character’s name as “Jennifier”. I’m not surprised that this appears to be the first full (and real) review for this thing online – if not for the HMAD “requirement” there’s no way in hell I’d be able to get through it to write one myself.

The disc (which has a grating Our Lady Peace-ian rock song blaring on the menu at a full 20 volume settings louder than the movie) has one extra feature – some context-free deleted scenes that will in no way improve your thoughts on the movie, and thus might have well been put back in the feature to save the DVD designer some time making a sub-menu. So they put more effort into thinking up false claims about the movie (like “This movie will change your life” and “It will be one of the best horror movies of all time”, as well as “This movie has just mad a quantum leap in horror films” – BOLD!) than they did on the DVD that will be the primary source of most of its viewing. Yet another amazing decision from the “Gjeniuses” behind this thing.

What say you?

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Zombie Nation (2004)

APRIL 3, 2012

GENRE: CRAP, REVENGE, ZOMBIE (?)
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

Well, that’s it. Zombie Nation was the last film in the horror section at my Blockbuster (the only one that hasn’t closed of the four that I have used since beginning HMAD) that I had yet to see. Barring a few films from the 90s and early 00s that I had seen but never reviewed for a non canon entry, you could go into the Blockbuster at Riverside/Fulton with your smartphone and get my thoughts on every single movie you see in the horror aisle. That is impressive, no? No.

Anyway, there’s a reason I had put this one off for so long – I knew it would be a piece of shit. Being an Ulli Lommel film, there was little hope of it being even mildly bad, being that just about every other one I’ve seen from him would rank among the lowest of the low in the crap bin. Plus, unlike those others, this has notoriety that extends beyond my own bias – Zombie Nation currently ranks 12th on IMDb’s list of the worst movies of all time, higher (lower?) than any of his others, as well as anything from Uwe Boll or notorious whipping boys like From Justin To Kelly. The only films that are lower are a few MST3k titles like Manos and Red Zone Cuba, and Baby Geniuses 2. In other words, movies that get hated on just for existing and having some sort of exposure. Zombie Nation, on the other hand (which was once at #1) had to be sought out; no one's rating it bad just to be funny like Gigli or Battlefield Earth or whatever.

But does it deserve to be THAT low rated compared to his others? No, because they’re all equally terrible, and suffer from the same problems. Incoherent plotting, terrible acting across the board, out of nowhere misogyny that lacks the “charm” of similar sentiment in old Italian films… it’s all here in spades. However, there are two reasons I can think of that might explain why this one would be so much more hated than the others. One – it was actually his last film as a director of “regular” horror movies before he got obsessed with serial killers, so there’s some novelty value to it, not to mention potentially more appeal for those poor sods who liked his early 80s work and wanted to see what he was up to. If nothing else, at least he’s not desecrating the memories of actual murder victims with this one.

The other thing that might cause some ire is that the cover boasts a typical ghoulish zombie with blank eyes, broken teeth and sores all over their face, yet the movie itself features the least zombie-like “zombies” I’ve ever seen. They’re resurrected dead, but they look pretty normal for the most part – their only blemish is that their eyes are now surrounded with dark circles, making them look like raccoons (or prostitutes). Once they figure out that they can just put on some sunglasses, there is no discernible difference between them and the still living characters.

Plus, they don’t even show up until the movie’s final half hour, making you suffer through Lommel’s usual garbage without any real horror to make up for it. The entire movie until that point is just a trio of scenes repeated over and over: our villain (Singer) kidnaps/kills a girl, his partner objects to his superiors, and then the two men talk. Sometimes we go into flashback mode, which is often represented by blurry still photos as Singer recounts going to church or something. Finally, the women that have been killed come back to life, giving the plot some semblance of “progress”, but it’s still a horrid mess, as they only have one target so there’s not much left to do from there but gather together and kill him. Lommel pads things out with a few random victims on their way (a couple of guys offering them a ride), but it doesn’t help much. I did particularly enjoy when he stopped the movie cold for no reason whatsoever to have Singer argue with an angry customer at the furniture store that he takes his victims to. The women is there to buy a couch, and he keeps telling her “We’re closed!” as she gets angrier and angrier about not having a couch. It’s one of those scenes you’ll be watching and start to wonder if you’re just having a fever dream or something, because your brain cannot possibly process that this moment was presumably written (or at least plotted out), shot, digitized, edited, and put into a film that some people in the world have presumably paid to see.

I was also charmed in a way by Lommel’s insane music choices, as the final third of the film features nearly wall to wall electronic pop that in no way matches the mood of what is on screen. This after a full length rendition of “Let There Be Peace On Earth”, which has to be considered some sort of sacrilege, right? Either way, it fits the movie’s wholly jarring nature, where almost nothing fits together – including the footage itself, which often switches to consumer grade video for closeups. Is it possible that the director is so inept that he forgot to shoot inserts and such when making the movie and had to go back with a different camera? Yes, it is very possible.

Lommel also provides a commentary with two others (producers, I think), but it’s akin to someone in a theater making a few comments under their breath to whoever they’re with as opposed to a “running” commentary. They go silent so often I occasionally forgot that they were even supposed to be there, momentarily thinking “Who is talking?” when they’d start up again. And most of what they DO say involves pointing out the locations or what other horrible Lommel movies the actors were in before or after (they say something about shooting this two years before recording the commentary). Occasionally one of the producers will mock a bad set design or something, but those moments are few and far between, and nothing is as funny as what you probably shouted at the screen while watching it. So there you go, an utterly worthless movie that features an even more worthless commentary. The trailer is also there, because Lommel and his people actively hate everyone else in the world and thus wanted to twist the knife that much more.

What say you?

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Beneath The Mississippi (2008)

AUGUST 20, 2011

GENRE: CRAP, GHOST, PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

I just looked over my list of “Crap” films on HMAD (refresher – films without any redeeming value whatsoever; the worst of the worst in other words), and I am hard-pressed to find a movie of less value than Beneath The Mississippi, which fails on nearly every level a film can be measured by. In fact, some of these films I should probably “de-tag”, especially the earlier ones in HMAD history as I was naively thinking it couldn’t get worse than things like They or The Breed (let alone harmless, forgettable junk like Pulse or Prey), but believe me, if 3-4 years from now I am reviewing something and saying “you know, in retrospect, Beneath The Mississippi wasn’t THAT bad”, I will quit on the spot.

Honestly, apart from a fairly decent main theme, there wasn’t anything even remotely approaching a decent movie here, or even a watchable one. Hell even in Dead Calling or Drive Thru (frequent punching bags) my reviews point out that at least there was a cute girl to look at or something, but this can’t even offer that much. And it’s not a slam on the actresses, it’s the fact that I can’t SEE THEM CLEARLY enough to judge whether or not they’re attractive or not. Just take a look at these screenshots:

Now, I didn’t go out of my way to find the worst of the worst, I just took them from 30 minute intervals in the film. You’ll notice the last one’s not THAT bad (still underexposed and poorly digitized/compressed), but guess what – that’s actually as best as it gets in the film, I think. Most resemble the others, where it’s so murky that it’s hard to even separate the character from the background, let alone any actual features. And yes, this is from Echo Bridge so it’s possible that the transfer is partially to blame, but with everything else in the movie clearly NOT the Bridge’s fault, I will side with them on this one and chalk it up to the filmmaker’s obvious incompetence.

What other problems, you might ask? Well how about the fact that the movie can’t even stick with one aspect ratio throughout its bloated 112 minute runtime? You get 2.35:1, 1:78:1, and some sort of approximation of 2.35:1 where the top portion and bottom portion of “black bars” aren’t evenly distributed, as if they did a mask over their footage in Final Cut Pro and didn’t bother to check to make sure it was even. To be fair, it DOES seem like there’s some sort of attempt to make this a creative decision, as one shot actually changes from 2.35 to 1.78 as a character dies (I think?) so maybe there’s some sort of “in the real world it’s 1.78 but in the hallucination world it’s 2.35” motif going on, but if so it’s a remarkably failed attempt at one, and if I hated myself enough to watch any part of this movie again I could probably debunk that anyway (in fact I know I can since the issue begins in the first few minutes, before they even set off on their trip let alone start going crazy).

At least, I THINK they are going crazy. I am not a deaf person (in fact my hearing is about my only sense that functions at 100%, I can usually hear my cell phone buried in my pants in another room while I’m watching TV in my pajamas!), but I think I know now what the world “sounds” like to those who have at least partial hearing left – it sounds like Beneath The Mississippi. The dialogue in the film doesn’t seem to be spoken, only muttered – only about 10% of the lines are clearly spoken and recorded. After the opening scene’s narration, at least 10-15 minutes went by before I could pick out another wholly discernible line of dialogue; even catching the character’s names took some effort. And some lines are clearly dubbed, so the filmmakers know how that process works, so I am baffled why they didn’t just re-dub the entire movie once it became clear that their sound guy was clearly drunk or working with malfunctioning equipment. I can understand a radio through a wall easier than the average scene in this movie.

In fact the movie inspired what will be my next week’s article for Badass Digest (I’m writing about Fright Night this week): taking pride in your work. Having just witnessed some of the post production issues on Chillerama, I understand that sometimes you just have to let stuff go because the time just isn’t there to do it the way you want (even with pointless stuff like my own credits – I wanted to do more animation with the full-screen credits for the four directors and the producers, but just wasn’t given enough time). But here’s the thing: Chillerama is premiering in two days and was bought up prior to completion by a major distribution company, with a release date in mind, whereas Mississippi was an independent film shot in 2004 and the movie was first released in July of 2011 (with a few festival screenings in 2008, as best as I can tell – their official website is maddeningly vague). Needless to say, I think they had time to go back and fix the sound, edit it properly so that room tone stayed consistent as they cut back and forth during a conversation, sync up the dubbed shots a bit better, etc. Hell I myself could improve this movie just using the DVD and my own personal (non-professional) computer, so there’s plenty of ways to improve it when they have the actual elements at their disposal. I'm sure they didn't INTEND their audio to be this awful, but the point is there was time to improve it, if not fix it entirely. And besides, being a primarily exterior film, ANY production would have known that ADR would be necessary as source sound would often be marred by things beyond control - i.e. planes, other boats, birds, etc.

They also could have edited it down a bit (or a lot). 112 minutes for a movie that’s essentially Blair Witch but with 6 people is ridiculous; even YellowBrickRoad came in much shorter. The one benefit to never having anything approaching coherent dialogue in your movie or a complicated plot (basically they go down the river, one disappears, the rest start freaking out and yelling at each other, one by one they die/disappear) is that you can literally just remove entire chunks of it and it won’t matter, because no one in the audience can probably understand much of what is happening anyway, nor have we been given enough reason to care about any of the characters to be upset if a slice-happy editor inadvertently removed the scene where they disappeared.

But dammit, I stuck with it. I would not let the unintelligible dialogue, the image so ugly that I was worried my TV might commit suicide, the laughably bad production value (a newspaper headline about the “Soul Survivor” of some tragedy is a particular highlight), or the basic fact that I hated it beat me! Sure, I had plenty of Xbox games to play and other movies/shows to watch, and could have just said “Fuck you”, thrown the disc in the trash, and watched some random Maneater movie on Netflix, but I was hellbent on making it all the way through. And this is great, because I then looked up the movie on IMDb and found that I seem to be the first person to actually watch the goddamn thing. Not only did it not have any external or user reviews, but it didn’t even have 5 VOTES yet (mine seems to be the 5th, in fact), and the only posts on its messageboard are from the director. The DVD has been out for a month and yet not even the usual trolls have bothered to chime in with their “worst movie ever!” insight (for once I might not even counter that they haven’t seen enough movies – I sure as hell have and I am contemplating slotting this as indeed the worst movie I’ve ever seen). Not to mention, it apparently DID show at a festival in 2008 (and won two awards, for the love of Christ), but the internet yields absolutely no reactions of any kind on any site. Even some of those obscure (pre-internet) Hong Kong movies I’ve seen at the New Bev I can find SOMETHING on, but this, after about a half hour, the only evidence of it being watched I could find were my own tweets about how terrible it was.

Let’s keep it that way. The movie is not available on Netflix streaming or anything of that sort, best as I can tell, and even a movie this terrible doesn’t deserve to be downloaded, so the only way to see it would be to buy a copy, and I strongly urge that you do not do that (I’ll be keeping my copy as a reminder to keep from being too harsh on any other film in the future). And it’s too goddamn long to even merit a “hey let’s get drunk and watch this” type viewing. Not to mention, the film’s presentation will have you convinced that you’re already drunk out of your mind even if you hadn’t taken your first sip, so it’s potentially dangerous as well.

You may notice that I haven’t mentioned any names yet. There’s a reason: it’s possible that the filmmakers (or at least, whoever did their credits) knew how terrible the movie was and tried to obscure their involvement, because how else could you explain these illegible credits? Even the damn title is near impossible to make out:

So perhaps Joanic Dshayivr? doesn’t want to be associated with this thing, and thus I will respect his/her wishes. I do not wish them luck on their next project, however. If in 7 years this was the best they could do I can’t imagine how bad something that was “rushed” (like a normal movie) would turn out.

What say you? (Nothing, no one else has seen it.)

PLEASE, GO ON...

Deadtime Stories Volume 1 (2009)

JULY 4, 2011

GENRE: ANTHOLOGY, CRAP
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

The girl in the first story is very cute. I liked the music in the second story. The third story has some nice old timey atmosphere.

And there you have it; the only nice things I can say about Deadtime Stories Volume 1, a godawful anthology that ranks as one of the absolute worst films I’ve watched for HMAD this year. In fact, sadly enough, the only thing that might be worse is Night of the Living Dead 30th Anniversary, so I guess it’s just not a good year for Romero cash-ins around these parts.

The difference is, this one (sort of) has Romero’s involvement. Jeff Monahan, who wrote all of the stories, appears to be a friend of Romero’s, having appeared in several of his films going back to Two Evil Eyes, but the other two primary forces behind this thing (Michael Fischa and Matt Walsh) have previous connection to Romero OR Monahan that I could find, so how this thing came together is probably more interesting than anything on screen. Anyway, George provides the wraparound segments, introducing each tale in rhyme as he reads from a book, sort of like The Cryptkeeper, or Carpenter’s host from Body Bags, except, you know, those things are good. The wraparounds are probably the best part of the movie, simply because it’s Romero talking instead of the woeful actors in the stories, but even they reek of sloppiness – even though it seems like his entire performance could have been captured in ten minutes, his outfit noticeably changes mid-sentence on more than one occasion (he appears on a bank of TVs, see picture below because I refuse to put the effort into trying to explain it).

So like he’ll be on one TV in that outfit, and then he’ll finish his thought on another TV but with different clothes. This actually makes me sadder about the whole affair – he apparently had to come back to shoot more footage and thus they wasted his time at least twice. I assume that the continuity errors are the result of switching the stories around. Perfectly fitting for such a sloppy, lazy movie, there has apparently been some re-editing and story swapping between Volume 1 and Volume 2 (which is coming later this year – can’t wait!). The IMDb page for Volume 2 actually lists most of the information for this movie (i.e. the actors), and the lone bit of trivia for Volume 1 concerns a story called The Gorge, which doesn’t appear in the film. And neither the IMDb page (for either volume) OR the DVD case mentions that Tom Savini directed the 3rd short film, which was just repurposed from Tom Savini’s Chill Factor, a would-be anthology series of its own that was released on DVD back in 2004. So even though his name means a lot more to would-be viewers, it doesn’t appear anywhere on the box art. Nice job, fellas.

Sadly, his story is just as terrible as the others, and the fact that it was shot as part of a different production (though has the same writer) is quite noticeable – it’s not even at the same aspect ratio. But as mentioned, it at least has some nice period atmosphere, or is that atmosphere, period? The other two stories take place almost entirely in the daytime, with flat, excessive lighting similar to Full Moon productions giving it an extra bit of horseshitty flair. It’s also the only thing one could see inspiring Romero’s involvement, as it’s a bit of a Martin-esque tale of a young vampire, but with a stupid, somewhat confusing twist.

Couldn’t tell you which of the other two is worse. The first is like a Cannibal Holocaust remake except without anything resembling suspense or even violence, as everything occurs off-screen, often confusingly so. People just suddenly have spikes through their mouths or whatever and then the other characters scream or run around until the next person’s demise is left to our imagination. The actors are largely abysmal, and there’s a final twist that’s almost stupid enough to applaud, and might even have worked if the 20 minutes that preceded it had even an inkling of the dark humor or morbid tone that this final bit did. Instead, it just seems grafted on from a different story entirely, and thus served only to further annoy me.

The second could have been fun, but instead they decided to approach the story as melodramatically as possible, making it the most boring (and seemingly the longest) of the bunch even though it has a fishwoman biting a guy’s dick off. How do you make this boring, you may ask? Just watch Deadtime Stories! Actually, don’t – I’ll just tell you: by having two terrible actors endlessly talking about one of their lost loves and how she’s probably a mermaid now due to some curse. By the time she comes back and reveals her nature (which is kind of a fun reveal, because instead of giving her a fin they just change her face into that of a fish), any sensible viewer would have long since given up caring what was going on.

What ultimately ties all of the films together is their total lack of competence. Everything looks flat and ugly, and I’d be shocked if any of the shorts were shot over more than a two day period. There’s a bit in the first one where a guy is attacked in the water (off-screen, of course) and the others run back to get him, and the entire sequence plays out in a master shot from far back in the beach (I think it’s supposed to be a POV shot of one of the cannibal dudes). Even if you didn’t have a shot of the guy being attacked, it still could have been an exciting sequence with some editing – shots of the heroes trying to get to the injured guy, shots of the guy slowly drowning/sinking/bleeding out/whatever, and even the POV shots to let us know that they were facing more than one obstacle. Instead, we just watch a single shot of a bunch of bad actors splashing around like jackasses for 90 seconds or so, rendering the entire sequence inert.

Again, I’m more interested in the behind the scenes drama than anything else. Bloody Disgusting reported on filming of this thing back in 2007 (and again, Savini’s entry is even older), and even though it’s played a few festivals over the past couple years, I was unable to find a single review of it. Nor can I find any explanation for why the stories seem to have been swapped – logic would dictate that they wanted to put their strongest entries on the first volume and thus get people excited for the (lesser) 2nd, but I can’t imagine anyone would be interested in further entries after watching this. Plus, if that was indeed the case, and these are the best they got, then why add Savini’s pre-existing entry (and then not bother to include his name on the marketing to boot)? They obviously have enough entries to fill a movie (the trailer for 2 is actually included on the disc), so why are they going back and using old shit that’s already available in a different package/title?

However, the only “extra” on the disc is the aforementioned trailers, including one for a Jason Statham movie called Blitz that features one of the greatest one-liners in action movie history (I won’t spoil it, but it involves Gary Coleman - however the joke doesn't appear on the Youtube trailers I found, edited out of respect?). I can only assume that Monahan and his cohorts were either too embarrassed to discuss this rancid pile, or too busy making another to contribute any sort of supplemental material. Fine by me though, the 75 minutes I spent with it were more than enough. A truly worthless disc on every conceivable level.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

The Stay Awake (1987)

JUNE 15, 2011

GENRE: CRAP, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

Every now and then I consider just ‘retiring’ the “Crap” tag for movies, because it’s all relative, and some of the ones I labeled as such back in 2007 or 2008 I probably wouldn’t do the same for today. But then I see a movie like The Stay Awake, and thus my thinking changes, because I think there’s a need to differentiate between the bad movies that are fun to watch, and movies like this, which offers no entertainment value whatsoever, intentional or not.

If I can give the money any sort of compliment, it would be that at least it’s consistently terrible. Some movies start good and are ruined by terrible third acts, others are kind of bland until that point... this one starts and ends on the same level, which would be a blend of incoherency and unparalleled unexcitement. We begin with a serial killer in America being executed, but not before threatening to return to kill again, an obvious allusion to Shocker (yes, this movie is two years older than Shocker, so if anything it's the other way around, but I refuse to give it that much credit). Then we cut 19 years later to an all-girl school in Europe, where his unseen spirit begins floating around endlessly via POV shots. Why here? Why now? What’s he been doing in the meantime? Did it take him that long to cross the ocean? Don’t look for any of these questions to be answered, seems to me that you could have just removed the opening scene entirely and it wouldn’t really make much of a difference.

As he floats around, we cut back and forth between him and the world’s least arousing or strenuous aerobics class, a scene that seems to go on for a full five minutes. It should be introducing us to our main characters, but damned if I could remember any of their names by the time I shut the movie off, nor could I successfully point at pictures of which ones survived. Not because I wasn’t paying attention, but because they were so bland and interchangeable. One even pegs herself as a bookworm (she’s comparing herself to the “athletic” one), but this doesn’t have much to do with anything and thus it’s a bad line that doesn’t even serve a purpose. To hell with the academy; if someone wanted to be a detective, they should just be required to watch this movie and then identify the characters later – if they are able to do so, they clearly have the attention span and critical thinking skills required to investigate crimes.

Another major issue is that it doesn’t offer anything to entice the viewer, an unforgivable sin for a late 80s horror movie that is clearly influenced by things like Night Of The Demons. Gore? Barely even qualifies, but there are a couple of brief shots of tiny amounts of blood being thrown on a wall, otherwise everything is off-screen or might as well be (there’s a Burning style bit where he makes up for boring us for so long by dispatching 3-4 kids at once, but it’s nearly impossible to tell what is happening because of the rapid cutting and closeup camerawork). And you’d think a movie with seven girls, some of whom are sneaking in boyfriends, would at least offer SOME skin, but I’ve seen more risqué footage on Mike & Molly. At one point they even all go into the shower and we still don’t see anything but a pair of legs. It’s like, who are you making this movie for? Did they honestly think their incoherent story about a country (time?) spanning ghost that goes after a group of girls inexplicably having some sort of sleepover at their private school was so intriguing that they didn’t need to have gore or nudity to “cheapen” it?

I mean, let me describe one “action” scene that occurs in the third act. Four of the girls run out to a car and immediately realize that they don’t have the keys. This is horror 101 stuff; someone has to go back in and put themselves in danger. Well, the whole act of going back to get the keys lasts about 30 seconds and poses no more danger than they were already up against. Anyway, they drive for a bit, and then the car suddenly stops, as ghosty has used his powers to stall the engine. He then starts melting the thing, which is kind of cool, but everyone gets away safely (why have so many people if you’re not going to kill a few of them?). But as they start to run, even though the car is of no use anymore due to being melted, he keeps focusing on the car, and we are treated to not one, not two, but FOUR long shots of the headlights/taillights breaking, which is this movie’s equivalent of beating a dead horse. And the girls apparently realize fairly quickly that they aren’t in any danger while he does this, because rather than run back inside once they get to the school, they all turn and calmly watch the car self-destruct. Riveting, huh?

Now you might be thinking that sounds funny/bad, but trust me it’s just dull. Writer/director John Bernard seems hellbent on staging everything as blandly as possible, and thus canceling out the possibility of it working for laughs. “So bad it’s good” movies work as such because the filmmakers were genuinely trying to make a good film, whereas I’m actually kind of impressed that Bernard and his team had enough drive to even turn the cameras on in the first place. Luckily for us all, he hasn’t made a film since; his IMDb page has two credits, both of them for this movie. The asshole in me likes to think his subsequent attempts to get another film project funded resulted in him being laughed out of the room; the optimist in me assumes he realized how bad he was as a filmmaker and thus returned to accounting or whatever his backup job was.

The actresses haven’t fared much better. The lady playing the teacher actually had a fairly long/consistent career in television, dating back to the 60s, but seemingly gave up after appearing in this as she hasn’t had a credit since. Most of the other girls only have one other credit (if that), but that’s no loss since none were particularly good actresses and most of them weren’t even attractive. Now, that may sound crass, but again, consider the plot setup – 7-8 girls having a sleepover, in a film that starts with them working out in tights for the first five minutes of the movie. There’s no reason to have that sort of scenario unless you want to titillate the male portion of the audience, right? Fail. Some of them are cute, but with the crowded cast reducing many of the girls to glorified extras (the crusty old janitor has more screen time than a couple of them), it’s barely worth noting.

It IS worth noting that the IMDb page for this movie is laughably incomplete, not even listing all of the girls. But I can’t blame them, because the movie itself doesn’t bother to include full credits at the end, only listing the people that weren’t credited at the top of the movie, and those credits weren’t accompanied by their character name. Which means if you want to know who played Tina or which character one-time actress Jayne Hutton played, you’ll have to do some investigating. It’s possible that traditional cast credits were forthcoming, but the sequence noticeably cuts to the legal language (with a different font to boot) as soon as the additional cast list floats (mostly) past.

But really, the only name you need to pull from this is Avi Lerner, producer extraordinaire of pretty much every B-action movie made in the past 10 years or so, including The Expendables and Rambo, as well as a number of Nic Cage films (Wicker Man, Bad Lieutenant, and Drive Angry!). So the next time you want to mock Wicker Man or any of those DTV Seagal movies like Out for A Kill, just remember – those are actually an IMPROVEMENT for Lerner’s producing output.

What say you?

P.S. I was actually going to lead with this, but those who know me or read this site often enough are probably giggling at the title re: my tendency to fall asleep watching movies (even ones I like). Sadly, I managed to ‘stay awake’ for every frame of this thing.

PLEASE, GO ON...

The Slaughterhouse Massacre (2005)

APRIL 3, 2011

GENRE: CRAP, SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (SCREENER)

The worst thing about watching something as wholly wretched as The Slaughterhouse Massacre at home is that my TV is flanked by my DVD rack of non-horror (read: never/hardly ever watched) movies and my Xbox games, many of which are unfinished, some still in their shrink-wrap. At least if I'm stuck at work, I can shrug and say "What else am I going to do? Clean my desk?", but at home it's borderline soul-crushing - I've long since passed the point where I can at least laugh at amateurish nonsense like this.

Things go awry right off the bat, with the obligatory opening scene couple going to mess around on the floor of a slaughterhouse. The dude has piercings, so I guess we're supposed to think they are goth and edgy and thus it makes total sense that they'd be turned on by getting busy on the filthy/dried-bloody floor of a slaughterhouse, but I don't care if you're Marilyn Manson, this is just plain idiotic. That neither of the two can convincingly deliver a line and the photography is barely better than a Youtube video shot with the world's tiniest camera phone is the least of its problems.

Then we get back to back pointless scenes, one in a classroom featuring the most overacting extras in film history (they all groan in unison when the teacher tells them they have a paper due - they're in their final year of high school, shouldn't they be used to this by now?). The other is an overlong "party" scene in which a bunch of folks stand around muttering, two topless girls sort of lightly hug each other but never actually even kiss let alone do anything explicit, and we meet our five protagonists, none of whom are likable in the slightest. And of course, they have to have some drama, so there's cheating and a hinted at "secret" involved. Hey, remind me - which of the characters in Halloween was cheating on her boyfriend? Who in Friday the 13th hated one of the others? Oh right, NO ONE. Back in the day, slasher filmmakers not only made characters that we would like, but also ones that actually liked each other. Nowadays, all we get is a bunch of assholes who seemingly have no reason to remain friends.

Anyway, they of course get the bright idea to go to the slaughterhouse (though seemingly not to fuck, thankfully), and to give you an idea of both the extent of this movie's creativity and how it likes to pad things, the address is "13666" (whatever street) - a simple "666" won't suffice, we need to add the unlucky "13" to the mix for extra scariness! And then one of them starts saying the numbers. "13600... 13602..." I was afraid they would go all 33 even numbers, but to give the movie credit they move along. But not to the point we care about (people dying); that doesn't start to happen until the 50 minute mark or so. Now, I'd be a hypocrite if I said that this was far too long to wait, because Halloween takes that long to get to its first death (Annie's). The difference is, we had a lot of scenes devoted to making Annie, Laurie, and Lynda sympathetic and likable, not to mention a lot of great suspense/scare scenes, like when Michael was following them home from school. This movie offers none of that; it's just a bunch of assholes walking around scaring each other and wasting time until Marty Sickle shows up.

Oh, yeah, the killer's name is Marty Sickle. Again - the best horror killers didn't have weapons for names: Harry Warden, Michael Myers, Fred Krueger, etc - normal(ish) names that became iconic due to them being used in legitimately good movies. You think Jason Machete or Freddy Fingerblades would be huge franchise players? No, because that sounds stupid. And almost as if to further infuriate any intelligent audience member, Sickle is played by writer/director/editor/producer Paul Gagné, and the nice thing about someone taking on so many roles is that there is literally no one else to blame for the movie's failure. So, thanks for that, Mr. Gagné. Hilariously, when I checked his resume on IMDb to make sure I never accidentally watched one of his movies again, I found that he had directed tow more since this; one of which has an even LOWER IMDb rating, and another from 2009 that seemingly still hasn't been released.

And you'd think the killer showing up would improve things, but alas. Slaughterhouse Massacre may not be the worst film I've ever seen (those sort of things need to simmer in my brain for a while - get back to me in a few months), but it certainly has the clunkiest and most laughable action. Throughout the film Gagné had been filming nearly all conversation scenes in awkwardly blocked master shots, rather than employ something as dangerous and complicated as a closeup, and he continues this approach with the action bits. In my favorite example, our hero sort of slides a piece of meat across the floor towards Sickle, which actually holds him back (I couldn't find the trailer, so the clip is below! Skip to about :37 for the magic). That we watch all of this in one hand-held shot makes it all the more terrible, because no one is skilled enough an actor to actually do anything like act, so as the camera pans back and forth you're always catching a few seconds of these thespians waiting for their cue. There's another bit later where the hero announces "we have to keep moving!" and then instantly pauses to poke around on a table (I assume looking for a weapon - it's the same room as the previous example so why he didn't just get that amazing piece of meat is beyond me). Marty Sickle of course takes advantage of the situation and strikes, and since we're once again in a master shot, the two female actresses literally stand inches away not doing a goddamn thing as their friend faces certain death, as if they weren't aware they were even on camera.

Oh, and then the icing on this most woeful of cakes, the movie drags on interminably after the boyfriend dies, leaving just our heroine alive... or so we think. Suddenly, Gagné introduces a cop character and brings back a stoner friend who disappeared a while back (the type of guy you assume our heroine would find dead - it's the rare case where I was hoping for an off-screen kill), and then they do the slasher movie thing (walking around slowly, calling out "hello", etc) even though the movie should be over. Our heroine gets half-naked in the most ridiculous example of the concept since Deep Blue Sea, finds one of her dead friends bizarrely hanging via CGI effects (it's so close to his face that they could have just had him stand on a table with a rope around his neck, but it's clearly the work of CGI and compositing for some reason), and finally Sickle is beheaded via more terrible/awkward After Effects magic. Then we get the ugliest end credits I've ever seen, complete with a typo or two ("technition") and random words spelled in all caps or centered differently than the others, and then, mercifully, the one saving grace in the movie, it ends prior to any copyright information, thus not only keeping the movie from being another 15-20 seconds longer, but also allowing us to copy the film for our own use, I guess.

Now, you may have noticed that this review is more of a plot summary than I usually provide. That is to prove that I indeed kept watching the entire thing. As much as those Xbox games taunted me from the corner of my eye, I stuck with The Slaughterhouse Massacre until the bitter, awful, shockingly boring end. I take my Horror Movie A Day-ing very seriously (despite how easily some of you fell for my April Fool's joke, yeesh guys). Never give up, never surrender!

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Penance (2009)

MARCH 21, 2011

GENRE: MOCKUMENTARY, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

There are cynically produced movies, and there’s Penance, a movie so calculated to be created for a particular market and cast to be sold overseas that the director finds himself mentioning it more than once on the DVD. Seriously, in a 20 minute interview, the words “investor”, “foreign territories”, “pre-sale”, and other buzzwords that are more suited for a Deadline article about some Sundance movie pop up with alarming frequency, while things like “script” or “meaning” are glossed over or skipped entirely.

Needless to say, the movie is awful. I wasn’t aware that it was a found footage movie, but I did know the plot, and was thus instantly confused – “How are they going to justify using the camera?”. Well, they don’t. Despite running a “hospital” where they routinely kidnap, torture, and murder women, the main villain (Graham McTavish, who deserves better) for some reason has someone follow him around filming everything, which makes the motivations in Cloverfield look plausible in comparison. Not to be outdone in the stupidity department, our heroine (Marieh Delfino) decides to use her still camera’s “movie” function to film the various other women who have been abused, as “evidence” for the police once she escapes. Now, she’s just as mangled herself, and thus had all of the “evidence” she would need right there on her own body, so why she didn’t focus more of her attention on escaping is beyond me.

Even sillier, when she FINALLY mounts an escape attempt, she has her roommate (the lovely Alison Lange) join her, and gives her the camera. Now this girl is bleeding profusely all over from multiple wounds and likely in a severe state of shock, yet she picks up the camera and films Delfino as she makes her way down the halls and what not, instead of looking where she is going, or running wildly like someone who had been abused would do if they suddenly found themselves relatively free. So it’s stupid enough from a storytelling perspective, but the fact that it’s supposed to be the POV of a character in the film just makes it insulting. Even Diary of the Dead’s various snafus weren’t this offensive.

They can’t even sell the camera angle properly. Despite the fact that we plainly see that she is using a little still camera with a video function, Delfino is able to film long, high definition shots for a few days, when even the highest memory chip would only allow a couple minutes at most. She also grabs it and films herself sometimes, but uses both hands to do so (thumbs covering the lens and all!), which is just laughable. Thus, most of the time you will probably either forget that it’s supposed to be a verite film, or be thinking “where is she hiding this obviously giant camera?”, because they seemingly go out of their way to do everything about it completely wrong.

Hilariously, the only reason the found footage aspect seems to exist (besides helping sell it to certain markets, of course!) is to pay off a framing device that was all but completely removed from the film. Originally, there would be two cops looking at the footage, and they’d cut to them every now and then, with one cop seemingly fascinated by the villain while the other is detested by it. And the cops are played by two “names”, Jason Connery and Lochlyn Munro, who are given 2nd and 4th billing, respectively. But all of this was cut, leaving just a snippet of their final scene in the end titles (AFTER their otherwise baffling credits have rolled by), which also lacks the payoff, in which you’d discover that the cop Connery was playing was actually McTavish wearing a mask. I’m not joking. But without this stuff, you spend the entire movie wondering why you are watching everything through the camera lenses of its characters.

Ignoring all that, it’s still just a terrible movie. McTavish fancies himself a religious man, which means were treated to the usual babble about cleansing sins and other shit, as he cuts off women’s genitalia. Riveting. And when he’s not doing that, the women are being tasered or whipped, or just plain shot in the head for various infractions such as opting to take a large suitcase full of money and leave when offered the chance to do that OR stay and keep getting tortured (weirdest trick question ever). And as expected, the names in the cast, such as Michael Rooker, Tony Todd (who also popped up in the equally awful Bryan Loves You – stay away from found footage movies, Tony!), and James Duval, have limited screentime, so if you’re thinking “Well ____ is in it, so there’s something” – you can cue up a deleted scene from any of their other films and get just as much pleasure out of it. Writer/director/producer Jake Kennedy once again demonstrates his peculiar fascination with mutilating the male organ; on his previous film Days Of Darkness, when you turn into a zombie your penis and testicles fell off, and here, McTavish decides to castrate himself and then pull the gonads and other surrounding tissue out with his bare hands. What the hell is with this guy?

If the movie gets one thing right, it’s the casting of Delfino as the desperate mom turned stripper. A lot of movies cast insanely gorgeous women in these sort of roles, but Delfino, while attractive, does NOT look like stripper material, so in those few scenes she sticks out like a sore thumb, as she’s supposed to. Speaking of the stripper scenes (which are also burdened by the inane documentary approach – who the fuck would allow a guy to stand RIGHT next to them and film while they are getting a lapdance?), I love how instantly the women snap on any male presence. Duval plays a drunk college guy, and he walks over to Delfino and tries to strike up a conversation, the type of somewhat aggressive but also harmless flirting one would probably expect at a private stripper party. Yet he barely even gets around to asking her name before she’s giving him attitude and saying BACK OFF!, before running away from him entirely. Later, as soon as Rooker appears in the room, one of them smashes a bottle and holds the neck up to his face. What the hell is with these girls? It was one thing when Delfino freaked out – she’s new to this. Why are the seasoned pros so instantly scared of a guy arriving late to the party?

But those are the sort of things one would consider and revise if they were putting any effort into the script, which Kennedy clearly wasn’t interested in. As mentioned, his entire 20 minute interview is devoted to explaining the ins and outs of financing and distribution (even Mike Feifer mentions the story once in a while), and both of his commentaries (one with another producer, one solo) are largely given to discussing such matters, in addition to the usual low-budget horror production stories (“This is my producer’s house.” “This actor was only available for one day.” Etc.). He does offer that the genitalia-mutilating doctor was a real case in Australia, and the hospital is thankfully NOT the Linda Vista, so I’ll give him some minor credit on those points. Also, he mentions that his post producer was none other than Demian Lichtenstein, director of the awesome 3000 Miles To Graceland, which in a fairer world would have been a huge success and thus kept him away from trash like this.

Then there’s about an hour’s worth of what can be considered deleted scenes, including three alternate endings and 12-13 minutes’ worth of interviews with the characters (not the *actors*). Supposedly the first cut was around two hours, and the finished product is about 85 with very long/slow credits, so I guess it’s nice that they included pretty much everything that they cut, but most of it is explained in the Alone in the Dark-esque ending text crawl anyway. Anything you can read in this movie instead of watch – that’s a good thing.

The only bonus feature that I found actually inventive and impressive was an “Anatomy of a Shot” piece (not the actual IFC show) where Kennedy and some stand-in actors block out an entire scene as they run through it, making notes and adjustments where necessary, and then finally showing us their “good” take alongside the finished product. POV or not, blocking/rehearsing is an important but oft-rushed (sometimes skipped entirely) part of filmmaking, and poor planning can result in massive delays when you arrive on the set and realize you can’t quite do what you “shot in your head”. So A. it’s good to know they actually considered such things (at least for this scene), and B. it’s the type of feature I wish they had more often on movies. Especially nowadays, when bonus features are basically just there to instruct wannabe filmmakers (unless it happens to be your favorite movie – which I sincerely hope is not the case for anyone with this particular film), anything that can genuinely help someone rethink their process before setting out to make their own film is a valid use of disc space. Just a shame when it’s supplementing a worthless film like Penance.

What say you?

P.S. Mr. Kennedy – might want to spell check your text-based epilogue next time around. “Anonomous” is not a word. I hope that didn’t cost you a pre-sale in a key European territory.

PLEASE, GO ON...