Sometimes, trying to satisfy my addiction to psycho killers and slashers is like buying a bag of bad weed. And I say that without ever having smoked weed at all, so I can only assume watching this trio of films is how it feels to score bad weed.
POINT OF FEAR (2006)
Well, you won’t reach the point of fear watching this indie. A group of friends goes to a small town for a weekend in the woods, even though they look and sound like they already come from a small town.
Soon after their arrival, one of the girls goes to visit a weird doctor (he’s a cute beefy boy) who lost his young son and wife, and…he kidnaps her because he thinks she’s his dead wife.
For a majority of the film, the other friends hang out at their cabin, some of them worrying about their missing friend, the others saying she’s a big girl and she’ll come back when she’s good and ready.
Meanwhile, the doctor kills some random people to the sounds of thrash metal music. For the love of horror, if you are a fan of thrash metal and think it would be so cool to make a horror movie loaded with thrash metal…don’t make a horror movie. It just seems like the majority of thrash metal lovers who make horror movies loaded with thrash metal make terrible horror movies.
Eventually, all the friends end up at the doctor’s house with some cops for the final act so the doctor – who actually gives a pretty good performance – can run around the woods killing them and delivering monologues to let us know why he’s all fucked up.
DIE CHEERLEADER DIE (2008)
This is a tragic waste of a great slasher title. Snobby cheerleaders sit around various locations – a club, a classroom, a picnic bench – talking and ragging on the girls they don’t like, with their boyfriends joining them periodically to drone on and on about sex and irrelevant shit that actual teenagers would talk about.
Occasionally someone is killed, and the cops interrogate the cheerleaders once again.
Granted, there were actually a couple of highlights for me, but they weren’t worth sitting through this amateur production for. I mean, there’s an “actor” in the film who literally messes up a line and then starts it over—numerous times throughout the movie! I’m not even kidding. While a couple of the girls can deliver a bitchy line (acting like a bitch is probably the easiest emotion there is), this seriously feels like a homemade film starring a bunch of kids from drama club…who don’t even want to be in drama club.
So yeah, a couple of the kills are entertaining, including a chick being mouth stabbed by a dildo in a sex toy store and a guy being auto-erotically asphyxiated while his girlfriend blows him in a car.
Yeah…I see it, too. I obviously thought they were entertaining because they both involve phalluses.
STOPPED DEAD (2009)
In this ultra low budget, shot-on-video flick, b-queen Debbie Rochon plays the wife of a dude who’s convinced she’s fucking his married best friend. Awkward, considering the two couples are going on a road trip in an RV.
As the husband acts weird and paranoid and begins having strange delusions, the other three tease him, to the point that he leaves the RV and storms off into the woods. A while later, he runs back to the RV and tells the others he saw a bunch of bikers kill someone.
They race away from the scene, report it to the police, and then…begin discussing how their predicament is exactly the same as the Peter Fonda/Loretta Swit classic Race with the Devil.
Now, I’m pretty much going to stop here. I’ll just say, if your script dares to reference the amazing movie you are painfully, amateurishly trying to recreate, even if you do add a twist that is blatantly obvious from the very beginning…don’t make the movie.
