Step 1: Go to your local video shop and rent the following;
1/ The Vanguard
2/ Look
3/ Vampire Diary
4/ Trailer Park of Terror
Step 2: Watch them all.
I’m all for discovering “little” movies, the ones that either slipped under the radar or are simply too “niche-y” to fit comfortably in any genre and find an audience.
However.
There is giving a small budget movie a shot, and wasting money on crap.
I would argue to death that 2 of the above 4 are wasted money, and the other two might merit a lesser example within the genre defence. In short they all suck though, and I would be happy to go through my entire life without seeing any of them again.
I didn’t make any notes when watching these, as within minutes I knew they sucked too much to bother. As I have watched them at various points over the last 6 weeks some of my recollections are hazy, as long as the primary message of don’t watch these in any circumstances gets through that shouldn’t matter.
The Vanguard
Plot: The Earth is overrun by zombie-like people that reacted badly to medicine administered (or something like that, I can’t remember and didn’t understand at the time either), one guy runs around Versus style chopping heads and mashing zombies, and apparently his blood holds the key to saving humanity, so he and a few other over-actors try to reach safety to fix the world.
Budget: About $8.50.
What was so horribly wrong then Smart-Guy?
To start with the zombies ran just like either gorillas from the Planet of the Apes remake, or the crawlers from The Descent, take your pick. They have little or no makeup aside from messy hair and they snarl a bit to appear scary.
They do the whole “run past the Hero so that he can hit you with the hatchet in a theatrical manner”. If he didn’t hit them they would simply run straight past with no effect. What kind of attack is that?
The acting is abysmal, point blank. I am no master of acting talent, but these guys just suck. The plot is a rip of several other better films, only this movie looks like a student film.
Worst of a bad bunch really.
Final Rating – 3.5 / 10. Redefines low budget crap.
Vampire Diary
Plot: A young woman sets out to make a documentary about a group of people who spend their weekends pretending to be vampires, only she meets another woman who claims that she actually is a vampire.
Budget: (If The Vanguard was $8.50, this looks more like) $85.00.
What was so horribly wrong then Smart-Guy?
I think I can understand why they thought there might be a movie in this, only they forgot that in real life there is NOTHING cool about people who think that they are really vampires, not for one second. And boy does that show through here with the bunch of dickheads that play the weekend bloodsuckers.
The lesbian vampire angle (always) shows promise, and there is some T&A, but now two weeks on I battle to recall anything about this flick. It is so lightweight and yawn-worthy in its own indie little way that they forgot to make anything interesting.
Also, I have two words if you desperately need to see the lesbian bits, p & orn.
I have actually seen worse than this, but then I absolutely hated those films too, so that is faint praise.
Final Rating – 4.5 / 10. A bit of T & A can’t derail this fast train to Shitsville.
Look
Plot: Look at least tries a new angle. The hook here is that security cameras and closed circuit TV is watching you all day, so using this footage the filmmakers follow a few groups of people around for a few days and piece together their stories.
Do the random people end up crossing paths and interacting with each other you say? You bet your sweet Pulp Fiction arse they do!
Budget: No-name actors and grainy security footage? Given that it is US made probably 74 million, but it looks like $74.00.
What was so horribly wrong then Smart-Guy?
Even though this is interminably boring beyond the initial premise, it is the most watchable and reprehensible of the films here, even if it ultimately feels like it is just Storytelling lite. (I mean the depressing movie a few years back where everyone interacted and everyone in it was either a horrible person, or the victim of a horrible person.)
Credit the guy who came up with the gimmick, but aside from two jailbait girls getting down to their G-bangers in the first 5 minutes there is nothing memorable here, and even during that scene I felt the need to look away for fear of being an accessory to something gross. The girls were meant to be in high school for fucks sakes!
Elaborately, painstakingly pointless.
Final Rating – 5 / 10. An original filmmaking premise let down by a yawnworthy plot.
Trailer Park of Terror
Plot: After a pointless first ten minutes that made no sense we move to the same old plot we always get; ie a bunch of young people are stranded outside a trailer park where they seek shelter, and in a night of unimaginable horror one by one they find that not all is as it seems.
Dun-Dun-DUNNNNNNNNN!!!!
Budget: Even more inexplicable, this looks shiny and new. You can actually see that they have spent money polishing this turd.
What was so horribly wrong then Smart-Guy?
Aside from the generic clichéd plot. The lack of laughs. The general inanity of proceedings. The fact that I swear the lead chick was Jamie Pressley from My Name Is Earl and I still refuse to believe it wasn’t even though the DVD cover and imdb beg to differ.
Nothing, this was just greeeeeaaaaaaattttttttt.
Final Rating – 4.5 / 10. Bad paint by numbers exercise, bet Jamie Pressley is happy she wasn’t in it.
In Summary:
Unfortunately these days it appears that the DVD cover is more important than the actual movie, I demand that video shops implement a do-over rule for such crap. If you rent something that claims to be good (and really they all should, otherwise why make the thing? No-one will market a DVD with “Not as good as we thought when we started making it but please buy it anyway as a favour.”), but actually sucks.
In this case it isn’t the $10 that I spent on renting all these things combined, it is the fact that in that 6 hours I could have almost finished an Xbox game, done some pointless exercise (wouldn’t have happened but I could have) or even “sigh”, spent some quality time with the family.
After a horrible movie I feel like I have been wronged somehow. Grocery stores get in trouble if they sell rotten veggies, butchers if they sell rotten meat, why shouldn’t video shops get in trouble if they continually and knowingly peddle in shitty movies?
