What you’re about to read is quite possibly one of the worst reviews I ever wrote.
The DVD starts out with a commercial with a tagline that’s a ripoff of a Sylvester Stallone movie, “Cobra.” Sub Rosa DVD advertises, “Hollywood is a disease: Meet the cure.” And man…what they’ve got to offer really doesn’t look all that pleasant. Corn syrup axe murders, guys eating handfuls of guts that look like they were produced in a “Doctor Dreadful” candy maker, lesbians, half naked corpses, and a gunshot killing that they were probably praying no one would do a frame advance on to watch as it goes from live person to corpse with a hole in its head in the space of one frame, suggesting editing like no tomorrow.
But what we have here is the very Columbine story (and somewhere, someone is going to PR-Spin this to say “ripped from today’s headlines” and cause me to want to viciously smack said person around) of a couple of high school bully targets who grab an escalating series of weapons and go forth to end their problems in a loud, grotesque fashion.
The first two minutes play host to a sequence so bizarre and so disgusting that I can’t believe it’s here. It’s a guy in a “Seven” movie t-shirt simultaneously eating a sandwich and jacking off to computer porn. It’s really just arm movements–no full frontal here–but still. I really didn’t need to see that. He follows that up by…well…just really unpleasant things. I’m not gonna describe it.
Of course, what our drunk psuedo killers don’t seem to realize that walking into someone’s house and holding them at crowbarpoint is seriously illegal and whoever lives there becomes justified to take a whole host of self-defense actions variable by state law but in many cases including shooting them in the head.
And what alarms me is the sheer number of movie posters around these people’s houses. They ostensibly all live with their parents, but their parents have no problems with a “Sgt. Bilko” movie poster right beside the front door. They have no problems with a swimsuit poster on the refrigerator door.
Inspired lunacy takes place around the twenty four and a half minute mark, as we discover that a fat guy’s keeping a chunk of drywall in his jeep.
The worst part about all this is the sheer incoherent nature of things. One minute they’re in a panic, trying to dispose of a body in the fifteen minutes before their parents get home (!), the next they’re chasing after another victim in the making, without any sort of explanation as to what they did with the corpse of the fat guy they left sitting on the front walk. These are plot holes so massive that entire subway systems could be built around them. On the plus side, they at least admit that this is a massive, massive plot hole.
But then, this is the directorial debut of the same guy who had a hand in writing “Aquanoids”, so I’m not expecting a whole lot going in.
Sadly, that’s exactly what I get. Not a whole lot.
Here’s an even better little twist for you–at the forty four minute forty eight second mark, the clock on the wall says three o’ clock (last call! for alcohol!–sorry, George Thorogood moment there!), but in only fifteen seconds of screen time, the clock has advanced to three fifteen. And THEN, not a minute after this scene began, time has somehow mysteriously advanced to five minutes of four! By the time the little scene with Lacey (the girl they’re about to kill this time) is over, almost a full day has passed if you believe the clock.
The ending is impressive as the plots begin to fall apart and the murderers betray each other’s trust in a really cheap fight sequence. And then, the cops show up, and a few more killings go down.
The special features include commentary from Spudic, a stills gallery, trailers for “Killers By Nature,” “The Christmas Season Massacre,” “Bizarre Lust of a Sexual Deviant,” “The Undertow,” and “The Severed Head Network.”
Plus, in perhaps the last word in bad taste, Spudic has the utter gall to include a drinking game. Everyone drinks, or “kills their victims” whenever an onscreen cue indicates they should. This is done for sequences in which:
1. The term “payback” is used.
2. People chase each other in circles around a vehicle.
3. Jeff (Seven shirt) states how soon his parents are going to be home.
All in all, I didn’t expect much less than this pure garbage from Spudic, and I got what I expected. This was the worst kind of fake-blood-drenched cinematic swill, preying on the recently-cooled corpses of a national tragedy to fuel a movie. What’s next, Eric? “Suicide Bombers By Nature?”
Pathetic.
