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.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

BLOODBATH: A TWELVE MOVIE COLLECTION OF HORROR - SO THEY SAY. GET YOUR SEATBELTS ON KIDDIES, THIS IS GOING TO BE A VERY BUMPY RIDE PART TWO


A Brush With Death (2007)

I had to check this out because it had been a while since I'd watched it and my mind betrayed me and just said 'Huh?' when I started writing out the review. Thanks a lot you worthless gray matter. First of all, this movie has the 'Kiss Of Death' (nothing to do with the title) when it starts with 'A Film Based On True Events'. Oh God noooooo! Actually that doesn't phase me anymore. ANY movie made on Earth whether with celluloid or digital media can have REAL events in it - after all, if it didn't it would be alien and our puny minds couldn't comprehend it anyway.

So. (There's my one word sentence, HA!) Five high school cheerleaders who are pushing 30 and in the proper categories for girls-I-hate-and-instantly-want-dead are tooling in their open air jeep with no seatbelts that no one drives anywhere ever. They're on their way to a country mansion for some summer fun that no one has anywhere ever so the believability of this 'true events' story is deflating fast. But hey, it's true there are girls (even if they're near 30), it's true there are Jeeps and it's true somewhere there are mansions. So we've got that.

By the time they get to the cornfields they run out of gas, natch. Two inbreds offer to help, Walter and Caleb. Caleb's nice but his bad stutter makes all the girls giggle except one because hey, true events and girls are true bitches. Umm, that's misogynistic isn't it? Why do they make pretty girls nasty? Eh, let's get this done.


What they don't know (but should have) is that this team has caught, raped and killed before. Wow. What a shocking development. But they get away from their clutches for the moment and continue on to their mansion. They notice a dilapidated house on the way and find out that 30 or 40 years ago (nobody seems to have an accurate count and I really don't care) a boy killed his whole family and used their blood to paint. Ooookay. Bored with the immaculate mansion and pool they have to play in they want to go to the dump and hang around a bit 'cause hey, if they don't we don't have a movie.


So we have the Rue Family Farmhouse and two little boys, one nice, one evil because they said so. And of course the one dominates the other because they said so. But we cut back to the spoiled rotten girls arriving at the mansion and one has a story they only tell us the last line of and I REALLY WANT TO HEAR THAT STORY! The last line was, "...and that's why you never buy tampons at the 7-Eleven." Hey - that was probably the best part of the movie and we don't get to hear it. Dammit. So they're at their McMansion and the story comes to a halt as they lounge around and nothing freaking happens.


Until a handsome young man shows up and all the girls turn to jelly - I wish. Nope, they're still girls and now they're competing for one guy. Yikes. So what's the deal and how do we end this? Oh, somebody kills the older dude who's been raping and killing girls - that is your one and only surprise of the movie so enjoy it.


So it goes and goes and goes, girls disappear one by one, the others never care enough to look for them, one likes Caleb, another likes Rankin. Yippee. And it goes on and on and we are now praying for death for... everybody, including the two boys and if they're the only two boys who are around there, it wasn't terribly hard to guess who they were. In fact, my horror worksheet (patent pending) was filled pretty early in this film.


A lot of people examine technical detail which I never really notice unless the sound is REALLY bad (I miss the CC in those cases 'cause I miss half the dialogue) or there are glaring errors such as boom mikes in the shot, crew people being reflected in glass or just plain dumb continuity errors (like the old psycho taking off his victim's tank top twice). Are those here? Probably but you know what? 

The 'payoff' of finding out who the killer is and why is sooooooo long in the making (okay it was 83 minutes but seemed twice that) that the viewer is the one praying for death and the confusing ending (one of two brothers killed the family, had two kids of his own, and kept painting in blood) that you really just don't care.



No comments:

Post a Comment