Hello to all those faithfully reading and hopefully enjoying this effort to make even the worst horror movie more watcha... aw, screw that - I'm not that good. If a movie makes you cringe because yet another batch of unlikable teens that are pushing 30 are inching toward their deaths, having a party no one does anywhere ever, a paranormal movie is boring you to tears with unending pans of empty rooms, or thanks to CGI technology when people finally bite it, their blood squirts everywhere except on the victim, the ground, the people next to them... you're in good company and this is the right place for you.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

WHAT WAS THIS FREAKING MOVIE ABOUT ANYWAY???




11:11 aka Hell's Gate 11:11 (2004) Canada

Besides bad movies that think they're great, movies that screw with you and movies that have big budgets but no original ideas what I really hate is a movie that can't decide what the hell it wants to be so it just squishes a bunch of ideas together, explains nothing and ends without any resolution whatsoever. The only distinction this piece of garbage might have is that it is an earlier 11/11 movie than the other two turkeys that came out in 2011.

We start with the duh premise that Sara as a young girl is told to stay near the house which she of course disobeys and finds this red headed girl to play with out in the field when she hears her parents call her. The red head disappears. 

Sara then hears her parents (she's hiding in a closet) being murdered by escaped convicts that the mother conveniently sees in a newspaper two seconds before they kill her husband (he gets shot in the back but the blood splashes on the front of his shirt and when he drops there's no wound and no blood on his back). After killing the mother they hear the little girl scream and open the closet.

Sara has found a gun and the two convicts are shot - but not by her. Do they explain this? No, and get used to it 'cause that's how the rest of the movie's going to go. Skip ahead eighteen years and she's in college. Uh, what? 

She was at least six to eight years old, that would make her 22-24. Isn't that a little old? She's taking one of those paranormal courses that are taught at no college in no country ever. So of course things start to go wonky (my word, I like it) but that still doesn't mean that they are going to make any sense.

Sara is unpopular to begin with for accusing a popular student with trying to rape her. How progressive. So the 'cool kids' hate her - but one by one they're killed suspiciously with the help of a tall redhead that the movie doesn't identify but at one point Sara said it was her mother. Umm, no. I saw her mom and she looked nothing like her. 

Later it's said that the woman is a little girl that popped in and out when Sara was little, intimating that she's a ghost of some kind because the same little girl also was in a home video of her mother when SHE was little. Uh, what? So who the hell is she? Nope, not going to tell you.


So apparently in Canada they play with the paranormal with a little less high tech gear, like Geiger counters. So THAT'S how all those people get radiation burns - hanging around ghosts. Mystery solved. But wait, you ask breathlessly, what does this have to do with 11:11? Absolutely nothing. 

Oh there's vague mention of some Mayan prophecy about it (Wait, didn't they say the world ended in 2012?) and several times she sees the two 11's together (and the redheaded whosit tells her she 'can't avoid her destiny') but other than that, meh. It's just another gimmick to make a muddled ghost story interesting and it fails. Miserably.

So does the acting in this movie. All the 'students' look to be in their 30's and are about as cliche' as movie students can get. You've got jocks, popular girls, bad girls, bad boys... blech.

How does it end? I could tell you but it wouldn't make any sense. Okay, she ends up shooting her almost-boyfriend and walks off with the, uh, ghost? Mother? She's got to go to her destiny you know. Apparently it's not far off if they can walk to it. And boom, movie's over. 

You know a movie is bad when you want it to last a bit longer to bloody explain itself and tell you why you just spent 95 minutes looking at a film that was not only bad but so distorted people looked eight feet tall. Kind of reminded me of older movies we watched at the drive-in. But those movies were made a hell of a lot better.



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