Well, here we are again! This week's movie, Dead In 3 Days, is a slasher flick from Austria. Beyond that, I know almost nothing about this particular movie. Oh, and it's my first movie since I had my NetFlix membership reinstated! No more waiting a week for a BallBuster movie to arrive! YAY!!! SPOILERS, as always, begin here...
The movie starts us out in a green, swampy area. We see somebody skulking in the trees, and making what looks like a noose...no, wait a sec, they're untying the rope from a piece of wood.. The stranger brings the rope up a winding set of stairs, and ties it to a beam in a ceiling. Oops, I was right the first time. The person just made a noose and committed suicide. See, I should never second-guess myself. There's a shot of what is probably the dead man's face, or possibly an extreme closeup of whoever our presumed slasher will eventually turn out to be. It's probably the suicide victim...they wouldn't reveal the antagonist before at least setting the plot in motion.
Anyway, we see a young woman limping through what looks like it might be the same area, and her face is torn up and bloody. She sees a road up ahead, and staggers out of the trees, before collapsing on the road. A vehicle stops, and the girl sees a blurry face above her, possibly also covered with blood. (It looks like there's a line across the driver's face, but the image is extremely blurry, as it's a POV shot.) The injured woman begs her rescuer to help someone named Nina.
Then the movie goes back in time, and shows us what was happening 4 days ago. We see a fairly huge U-shaped building, which turns out to be a school. Inside, a nervous-looking guy is reading a poem to a grim panel of what I guess are teachers and school administrators.. Just outside the classroom, another male teen is watching the door like a hawk.
After reading his poem, the young man stares at the assembled group, and one of them asks him if reciting poetry is his only skill. Ouch! The kid in the hallway enters the women's restroom, where 3 female students are rolling what look like joints. They all look nervous when he walks in(gee, I wonder why...), and ask him if he "got in". He hoots and hollers, and the girls do a little celebratory squealing as well. So.....yes? No?
Then, one girl asks how Martin did. I'm guessing that Martin was the poetry-reciter. Instead of answering the question, the boy leaves the bathroom with all 3 girls, and they head back to wait for Martin to finish up his oral exam. Along the way, they spot another teen boy lurking near some lockers, and one girl comments that he gives her the creeps. Fascinating, Spock.
As they approach the classroom, Martin joins them in the hall. He supposedly passed his test, but feels as if that female teacher was picking on him. Boo-fricking-hoo, dude. Grow a pair. At an assembly, that same teacher announces that they all passed, and will get to graduate, which sends Martin flying out of his seat cheering. As everyone else joins in the victory, that one student who was shunned earlier is seen still sitting, glaring at the students around him.
The students all get their diplomas, and our core group of characters get into a jeep together, and do doughnuts in the parking lot. They nearly wipe out their fellow graduates, including that one grumpy kid. Boy, I'll bet he's the life of every party--funeral party, that is. Oh, and there's this really dopey song playing, where the lyrics explain what's happening. Literally, the singer is rocking out saying stuff like, "We're so happy, because we just graduated, now we get to waste our parents' money at college, unless we get killed by some dude in a swampy forest..."
As they all start singing along and head-banging to the music(seriously...), the vehicle hits something in the road. Pleaseletitbethesonofafisherman, pleaseletitbethesonofafisherman, pleaseletit--
Nope. It's someone's dog. The others urge the driver to put it out of its' misery, even going so far as to suggest running it over again. He yells at them that he can't, and tries to make one of its' paws return to a more natural angle. I don't know why, but the thing with the paw kinda made me snicker. I mean, he doesn't want to kill the poor thing, but torture is okay to do?
Anyway, the driver drops his girlfriend off first, and walks her to her front door. It turns out that he did kill the dog, and he asks her to forgive him. She eventually smiles and they kiss, as another girl in the car stares at them. Possible love triangle?
The girlfriend, a cute blond with a pixie-ish haircut, watches the jeep leave, then she turns back to the house. As she enters, she gets a text message telling her that she'll be dead in 3 days. Neat! Somebody should make a movie with that as the title! Oh, and by the way, when do any of these assholes get names?
Blondie enters the house, and is greeted by the family dog, who probably Knows What She Did After Graduation! She and the dog walk to the back of the house, where her family is waiting to snap the photo of a real, live high school graduate in the family. Oh, and accessory to Scooby-Doo-icide. But they're probably just celebrating that first thing.
Sadly, the blond girl's parents decide to squabble on the happy day. Her sister reveals that they were fighting right before she walked in the door, as well. So much for the graduation party. Let's go somewhere else...
Next up, we see a guy named "Clemens"(no shit, I had to look it up), who is busy scooping up big, fat fish out of a plastic tub with a net, and dropping them into a different container in the back of a vehicle that probably smells like Aquaman's crotch. Oh, and while I remember this, anyone out there remember Sabrina, The Teenaged Witch? Well, Clemens kinda resembles the guy who played Harvey on that show. Weird.
Clemens' dad comes over to the vehicle to talk to him, and tells him that, after he delivers the fish, he can keep the money from the delivery to go out and party with his friends. Then, without warning, we're at a gas station/car wash business. A cute, dark-haired girl(the one who was staring at Blondie and her boyfriend) works there and looks pretty bummed out about it.
The gas station girl is named Mona, I think(seriously....why don't any of the damned subtitles ever mention the names of these characters? Watching a slasher flick shouldn't require a full investigation every 5 minutes!), and she has a quick topless scene, as she changes into a fresh shirt to go out with her friends. Her father, who is in a wheelchair, tells her that her workshift isn't over, but she drowns out his voice with some rock music on her headphones. Then she grabs some cash and heads out.
Oh, and when Mona leaves, she closes the gas station for the remainder of the day as well. WTH? Her dad may be in a wheelchair, but he can certainly pump gas, can't he? But no, he just lets her walk all over him, I guess. She gets on a motorcycle and roars away.
Clemens, meanwhile is driving around and smoking a butt, maybe looking for a place to park the Fishmobile. Before he gets out to make the delivery, he gets the same "YOU'LL BE DEAD IN 3 DAYS" that the blond girl had on her phone. He turns off the phone, then makes his delivery.
Inside the restaurant, Clemens finds the fish tank in the kitchen, and lifts the lid off. He drops his scaly friends in with several other fish, then notices that the glass around the top of the tank looks kind of jagged. He adjusts the air going into the water tank, then mentions the rough glass to one of the chefs, warning them that someone could get hurt if the glass isn't covered with something. Foreshadowing?
Clemens leaves the kitchen behind, and finds himself shuffling down a dark, deserted hallway in what may or may not be in the same building as the restaurant. As he climbs a staircase, he hears something down the hall, and turns to look. He decides that he'd rather investigate a noise in a dark corridor, rather than go up some slightly illuminated stairs, so I'm guessing that he may be about to make a quick exit from the movie.
Clemens finds a door in the hallway slightly ajar, and peeks in. Seeing that it appears to be empty, he decides to go into the room, which looks like a hotel room. While Clemens walks over to a window, a girl follows him into the room. She demands to know why he's there, then she grins and kisses him. she's Alex, his girlfriend.
Then we get some random nonsense with a guy dancing around in his underwear, playing air guitar. After that, the group of friends all go to a nightclub together. I'm just going to take a stab in the dark here, and guess that the club is called something like Der DancinkScrewink Hottootrottzen. At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if I was right.
In addition to the group, that moody kid Patrick is also at the club. He glares at all of them, as usual, but he seems to pay particular attention to the blond girl. She tries to ignore him, and gives her boyfriend a big kiss. That also gets the attention of Mona, who tells some poor kid to fuck off when he asks her to dance. That was cruel, but also kind of funny.
They stop dancing so that he can take a potty break. Oh, and I think he's Martin, which would make the blond girl Nina. I've almost got this Rubik's Cube-style script figured out! Yay! Maybe I can even avoid a nervous breakdown when it ends...
Martin steps into an ultra-grungy bathroom, and walks by a sink that looks like someone crapped in it. While he's peeing, someone enters the restroom, and abducts him. When he doesn't return to the dance floor, Nina decides to see what's taking him so long. She starts to worry when she finds no sign of him, save for his phone on the floor with the death threat message on it.
Nina finds her friends, and shows them the text message. When some of them admit to getting the same message, Nina begs them to help her look for her boyfriend. Mostly to shut her up, they agree.
Meanwhile, Martin wakes up in a strange, blurry room, filled with ropes and various tools. Martin begins to cry as a figure approaches him, but that's all we get for now. I wonder if he'll get tortured a little first, or just killed? It's kind of weird to end a scene like that before we get some kind of action.
Nina turns up nothing, and the others are just as empty-handed. She takes Clemens' keys, and drives the group to the nearest police station. She attempts to file a missing persons report, but the officer on desk duty is Martin's cousin, and he laughs off the notion of Martin vanishing. He tells Nina that Martin is either passed out from too much alcohol, or that he hooked up with another girl at the club. Furious, Nina and her friends leave. Before she gets back into the jeep, Nina sees the desk cop looking at her through a window, and she gives him the finger.
Following that, we see Martin in a rowboat with the killer. Oh boy, I think the killer's going to pop the question! If you say yes, Martin, he might even untie you! Oops, no....the killer just shoved poor, trussed-up Martin overboard. Martin somehow manages to keep his head above the water, at least until the killer reveals that the rope is also attached to a circular block of concrete that also gets tossed into the water. Bye, Martin....say hi to Jason if he's down there!
The next morning, Nina hears the ringtone on Martin;s phone. and jumps out of bed to answer it. It's her mother, telling her that she missed her driving test, but that she made sure to reschedule it on Nina's behalf. Nina then goes out for a practice drive, and nearly crashes the car when she spots a guy who looks like Martin strolling on the sidewalk. She leaps out of the car to approach him, but it's just some random guy.
On her way back to her pissed-off driving instructor, Nina collides with a woman walking by. The woman keeps going, but Nina stares at her for a few seconds. Wait! Did Martin get reincarnated as some middle-aged woman with a double chin? Oh man, I hope so. That would be hilarious!
Nina tells her driving instructor to kiss her ass, then walks away. She eventually finds herself at the lake, staring into the water, lost in her thoughts. From quite a distance behind her, creepy Patrick is just giving her his usual 1,000-yard stare, but she's facing away from him. Dude, go fixate on Jodie Foster. It worked for that guy who shot Reagan. He had a successful future after that, right? Yeah, I'm sure he hit it big soon after.
Nina pays a visit to Mona at the gas station, and moans and gripes some more. Mona decides to cheer her up, by quitting early again, so they can head to the lake. When they get there, Mona, Clemens and the others meet up there as well. Everyone starts ribbing each other, and it almost seems like old times....
...that is, until Nina realizes that she can see Martin's corpse just below the surface of the lake. She dives in, and the others soon follow when they realize what she spotted. Nina plunges underwater, coming face-to-face with her dead boyfriend. Naturally, she screams. Her friends help her get back out of the water, and they all just helplessly put their arms around her while she cries.
When the police arrive, the lake becomes a 3-ring circus. Detectives search the land around the lake for any evidence, dive teams are sent down to examine the body(and hopefully retrieve it), and even Martin's cousin is there, looking ashamed for the way he treated Nina the night she came into the station.
At the police station, Nina and her friends get picked up by their folks. There's a lot of crying and hugging, until some cops walk in, leading Patrick into the office to be questioned. I doubt it's him, that'd be too easy.
Nina goes to bed that night, but just lies there in the dark, staring straight ahead. Martin's cousin is also restless, driving around with a female passenger in his car. He tells her that his cousin was still alive when he was thrown into the lake, and she tells him not to blame himself. Boy, this is getting depressing.
Nina has a nightmare about drowning, then wakes up to find her bedroom window open. She heads downstairs, and decides to go to the kitchen. While looking for a snack, she gets snatched up by the killer.
She wakes up in the trunk of a car, and the abductor then hauls Nina into some kind of shack. As Nina tries to scream past her gag, the killer's face is partially revealed. It kinda looks like the woman she bumped into on the street, which is pretty weird.
Anyway, the killer then turns away to do something, and Patrick suddenly pops up out of nowhere. He shushes Nina, the begins to loosen her wrists and ankles. When he looks back at the killer, they're no longer in that spot anymore! Uh ohhhhhh....
They make a mad dash out of the room, and quickly find the exit door, but it's either locked or jammed. As they try to force it open, the killer is seen coming up fast. Nina finally gets out, just as Patrick is grabbed. The killer pushes his face against a window, and Nina gets to watch as he gets murdered.
Nina then runs out into the street, and we get a re-enactment of the first scene in the film, except that Nina suddenly doesn't seem nearly as injured as she was when we saw this before. The driver gets her to the hospital, and the staff there wheel poor Nina into surgery. While all of this is happening, Clemens and Alex wake up after a nice, leisurely snugglefest.
Clemens heads down to the kitchen, where he grabs some booze and checks the fish tank. He fixes the air hose again, then walks away. In a dark area of the hotel, Clemens drops the bottle and gets a jump-scare from Alex. Alex tells him to go back to the room, while she cleans up the mess.
Alex throws away the shards from the bottle, then sees a fish on the floor, flopping around. When she goes in for a closer look, the killer grabs her from behind. Alex is lifted off the floor, and her throat is split open when the killer pushes her face into the fish tank. Clemens then comes back to the kitchen, where he discovers the blood-filled tank, as well as the mutilated body of his girlfriend. Naturally, he doesn't react well.
But hey, Nina's awake in her hospital bed! A nurse offers her some assistance, then slits poor Nina's throat wide open. Within seconds, the bed is drenched in blood, while Nina can do little more than go into death spasms.
Oops, still yet another nightmare sequence. The same nurse is in the room, and offers to bring in Nina's family. Then we see the authorities take away Alex's body, and the police decide to get Nina, Clemens and Mona together for a group interview. They show them all a sketch of the killer, and it gives Nina awful flashbacks. Neither one of her friends seem to have much of a reaction either way.
When asked if they know of anyone who might have a grudge against them, all 3 play dumb. Still, it's clear that they know much more than they're telling. Once they get alone again, we finally get to hear the full story.....I hope.
When they were all kids, a very young boy named Fabian wanted to be part of their little group. Being jerks, they refused. It got to the point that, one winter day, as they all played hockey on the frozen lake, they asked the boy, Fabian, to play in a remote section, to keep him from interfering with the game. The ice in that section, however, was thin, and poor little Fabian fell through and died. When the boy was finally rescued, he was in a coma, and died after 3 days....hence the title.
Anyway, eventually Fabian's father couldn't handle his grief, so he hung himself. Despite this fact, Nina clearly believes that the police sketch looks like the father. The mother is still alive, but the cops claim that she left town, even after Nina tells them that she bumped into her on the sidewalk the other day.
Okay, so are these hallucinations? Is Nina insane? Or is there more going on here than we know? Whatever the answer is, it's a restless night for all. Nina can't sleep, so she finds both Clemens and Mona to hang out with. The desk cop guy can't sleep, so he makes some calls to follow up on a few loose ends. And Nina's kid sister can't sleep, so she gets to be the one to warn the authorities if Nina and her friends don't come back from exploring the empty home of Fabian Haas and his family.
Before they get to the house, though, 2 things happen: First, they make a stop at Clemens' house, so that Clemens can steal his dad's gun; and secondly, Nina's sister leaves their home, either to follow the teens or head to the police station.
At the creepy Haas house, the 3 teens find an open door, and enter the premises. Nina's sister observes from the bushes, then somebody grabs her. Oh well, another one bites the dust.Oh, and their are indications inside the house that a person might still be living there.
Clemens hears someone, and decides to check it out. At the same time, Nina and Mona find a shrine to the Haas family, as well as numerous masks that would allow the killer to look like Mr. Haas. And that's exactly when Mrs. Haas shows up. She has Nina's sister as a hostage, but Clemens has the gun.
As they try to get answers from her, Mrs. Haas shoves a knife into Clemens' side, In the chaos, Clemens falls to the ground, Nina's sister rubs away, and Nina and Mona run in different directions, to confuse the killer. Mona is chased first, into a bedroom. She breaks a window just as the killer arrives, and jumps through, unaware that large spikes are waiting below to impale her. Ow.
Mona still lives! Despite her painful injuries, she manages to stagger into the road so---A-HA! It was her, not Nina, seen in the opening sequence. We then see Nina's sister get rescued, but Nina appears to be missing.
That's because Mrs. Haas took her out on the lake to drown the girl. But when the maniac moves to throw her into the lake, Nina stabs her, then dumps her overboard instead. Sadly, things get worse, as Nina realizes that the weighted rope is going into the water, and dragging her with it.
After some darkness and dreamy images of the ice hockey tragedy, Nina wakes up in the hospital, next to Mona. They exchange glances, then hold hands. The final image is of Mrs. Haas in the lake, standing there for eternity. THE END.
Wow, what a downer. Still, it had some pretty good plot twists and suspense going for it. Minus 1 point, though, for making me guess all the damn names.
And what did Dead in 3 Days teach me?
-Names are closely guarded secrets.
-Fish tanks are death machines.
-If you let someone drown, try to remember the event later in life! It might be important.
My next movie is a supernatural thriller, Long Time Dead. See you later, all!
