19.10.08

You Failed to Make A Movie: Alive or Dead

I don't know why I was expecting anything else. There's a reason slasher films go direct-to-video, after all, but this one was just unreasonably bad.

I'm not going to full describe the film as I usually do, because it's late and I'm tired, so I'm just going to use the magic of point form to lay out my problems with it:

1 - It opens with someone talking about how the situation they're in resembles a horror movie.
2 - A man drags a crazed killer into a bus. Then doesn't secure the man in any significant way.
3 - In the back of the bus, there's a girl. Who kidnapped her or why will never be made clear.
4 - The girl is asked how she wound up in the bus, and responds that 'John got a flat tire'. The other girl looks over and sees a mutilated corpse.
5 - Through the rest of the film, bound girl will never mention the death of her (boy?) friend again.
6 - After subduing the bus driver, the two girls and the mute serial killer mill about, trying to decide whether to just drive away or go inside the creepy castle that the serial killer had been driving to, and look for a phone. When there are no phone lines leading to it.
7 - They decide to go inside.
8 - Here's a better idea, filmmaker: The bus driver went into the house. Make him have taken the keys into the house. There, I've solved your plot problem and made your characters not all look like idiots in the process.
9 - It turns out bound girl has some connection to the serial killer, in that her doctor father was supposed to kill him (he's a horrible mutant) as a child, but didn't.
10 - It seems like this should provide some explanation for why bound girl got kidnapped and her (boy?)friend was mutilated, but it never does.
11 - Then it turns out that there's another mutant cannibal at the ranch, making it very unclear to whom the ranch belongs. Is it the killer's? The bus driver's? The old doctor who wants to murder the killer's? I'd guess the doctor's, since he refers to the bus driver as his caretaker, but then why is the smaller mutant (identified as the killer's child) there when the doctor doesn't know about him?
12 - For that matter, why does the doctor wear a black robe like he's in a satanic cult?
13 - First the doctor injects the killer with something, then shoots him in the leg with a gun clearly identifyable as a 2-shot over/under derringer.
14 - This leg injury will not hinder him at all for the rest of the film.
15 - The doctor is killed, then the two girls rally their strength and kill the younger cannibal, and shoot the killer in either shoulder with the derringer. For the record, that's three shots from the derringer.
16 - The girls make no effort to ensure that the monsterman is dead.
17 - The girls finally drive away in the bus (as they should have half an hour ago), and after hours of driving, they arrive back at other girl's jeep.
18 - Once back at the jeep, they're attacked by killer again, confusing matters further. How did he get there? There was only one vehicle at the castle - he couldn't have been hiding in the truck, since he's gigantic, and his injuries would have prevented him from beating them back to it. Did he run after them? Once again, the injuries.
19 - In the melee, other girl is killed, and the derringer falls to the ground.
20 - Bound girl drives to the nearest cabin, which turns out to be where the killer lives. In a fun note, the car's two front wheels are in no way flat, despite the plot being centered around that fact.
21 - In an unpleasant and entirely un-earned twist, killer has a pregnant woman tied to a bed.
22 - When untied, the woman immediately attempst to use a conveniently-placed barbecue fork to stab her uterus.
23 - Killer is then definitively killed when barbecue tongs are stabbed into his head.
24 - Why were there barbecue tools next to the bed where the woman was tied up?
25 - Pregnant woman and bound girl walk out of the house. It's then that pregnant woman pulls out the derringer and fires it across her uterus, killing her mutant baby.
26 - She falls over, dead, despite this being an entirely non-fatal wound.
27 - For the record, that was the 4th shot from a 2-shot derringer. Also, the gun was lying in a pile of dirt at the bottom of a hill at least a few hundred yards away.
28 - Bound girl then walks off down the road, sadly, despite the fact that there's a perfectly good jeep nearby, with a working cell phone in it, and she has no idea where she's going.
29 - Rather confusingly, Tom Welling, TV's Superboy, was thanked in the credits. Or hey, who knows, maybe it was another Tom Welling.

Stephen Groetsch, you're a terrible writer and director. The shooting was acceptable and the editing was totally competent, however. You might want to pursue those interests. And never write or direct again.

Although 'again' suggests that what you did this time could truthfully be called 'writing' or 'directing'. Since you utterly failed to make a movie, that's not the case. So don't take up either profession. Please.

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