Neon Maniacs

This week's movie is short on logic, but long on "WTF was THAT???" It's called Neon Maniacs, which is the first bizarre aspect of the film that never gets explained, and it's another "gem" from the mid-80's. It's sort of what The Monster Squad would have looked like if it had been R-rated. SPOILERS from here on out, so prepare yourself for a strange slasher this week....

The first scene more or less prepares us for the weirdness, by not really preparing us at all. For several seconds of narration, the screen is black, and a narrator says the following: "When the world is rule by violence and the soul of mankind fades, the children's' path shall be darkened by the shadows of...the Neon Maniacs." Well, that made everything perfectly clear, right?

Yeahhhh....so then we see some guy fishing at night. He picks up his gear to go home, then sees the skull of a steer in front of a door that's ajar. Curious, he lifts it up, and finds a small package inside the skull. It turns out to be a series of cards, each depicting a different "monster" posing for the world's lamest boudoir photo gallery. As the guy studies them, the door behind him opens wider, and an unseen person attacks the fisherman with an ax. Then we get the credits(complete with a New Age-y sounding theme song), featuring a cast so unknown, they might as well have been in Witness Protection rather than a movie!

Then we meet our schmucks, a group of teens in a van. There's Natalie, a cute blond celebrating her birthday; Lisa, an equally cute brunette; Steven, a nerdy schoolmate out walking his dog(named "Dog", according to him....until he calls it Elvis a minute later), and who seems to have a bit of a crush on Natalie; Ray, a curly-haired a-hole; and another couple who weren't introduced. They pretty much make fun of Steven, then drive away. Important stuff.

Up next, we meet a younger teen in a Dracula costume, a girl named Paula. She lives in a bedroom that Tommy Jarvis would've loved, filled with horror magazines, scary movie posters, and a zillion or so monster masks. She pretends that a werewolf mask is eating her hand. I think we've met the film's token virgin...

At a local park, the van full of teens disembark. A biker drives through their party, and we learn the name of that one anonymous girl is Sue. Her boyfriend, a dopey-looking guy in a denim vest, appears to be named Wally. While they flirt, Natalie and Lisa watch from the van. Oh, and this is kinda random, but Natalie in this scene looks a LOT like Ellie Cornell, the actress who played Rachel in Halloween 4 and Halloween 5. Weird, because in the previous scene, I didn't see it at all. Weird.

The 2 girls discuss birth control, which is as interesting as it sounds. *YAAAAWWWWN* Jim and Sue sit at a secluded picnic table in the dark, oblivious to the small army of monsters approaching. A firecracker goes off, scaring the couple, and one of the rubbery monsters sneaks up on them with a harpoon gun. Wally leaves Sue alone in the dark to find a spot where he can pee.

Natalie is revealed to be a virgin(2 virgins in 1 horror film? Crazy!), then we get a random shot of the Golden Gate Bridge and it apparently screams. Wally is still peeing, and Ray is about to get a blowjob. Boy, this thing is random. Natalie is still in the van, listening to the most laid-back deejay ever.

Wally decides to lie down near the tree he peed on(smart!), and is the first to die when a Maniac that resembles a big reptile plunges a hook into his face. Next to die is the girl going down on Ray, who is beheaded in the middle of the act right before Ray is killed also, by a Maniac dressed like a Samurai. The guy on the motorcycle gets it next, with a punch to the face by a biker Maniac. They brawl for a short time, while Samurai goes after the idiot with the firecrackers.

Confused yet? Wait, it gets even better. Dumbass firecracker guy plunges one into the Samurai's gut, which does absolutely nothing to him at all. The 2 bikers brawl some more, until the Maniac one grabs the ankle of the human biker dude and snaps it. Samurai also finishes off the firecracker guy by hacking off his arm, then stabbing him repeatedly.

Lisa and Ray stop making out long enough to notice that most of their friends have just been killed by monsters. Ray tosses his football at them, and Harpoon Maniac shoots it. Ray gets strangled by a noose, while Lisa is brought down by an arrow in her back. Natalie watches them die, then tries to escape in the van. A friggin' CAVEMAN leaps out of a tree to attack her. I shit you not. Being The Smartest Girl In The Movie, Natalie locks all of the doors, then climbs into the back of the van to hide. You read that right: Instead of getting out of there in THE VAN SHE COULD DRIVE AWAY IN, she climbs into the back. Awesome.

The Maniacs start to waddle in her direction, then try to get to Natalie by smashing the doors and windows. Then they just give up. Oh wait, no, they were just trying to sneak up on her. Gee movie, you sure had me fooled! As a group, the Maniacs decide to try to tip the van over. Then they stop again. And then the cops show up.

Oh, and this is only the first 15 minutes of the film.

At the police station, Natalie tries to explain what she saw, but no one buys her story. Well, almost no one--a detective named Wiley seems intrigued. The lieutenant, a cigar-chomping, smoke-blowing numbskull named Devin, suggests that they wait until morning to see if any evidence turns up. Uhhhhhh, say what now? You have several kids dead, and you don't want to secure the crime scene. What a douchebag. I hope he dies next.

Natalie gets a ride home from a chick who looks like Baby from Dirty Dancing. She hears a message from her mother on the answering machine...apparently, her folks are away on vacation. She nearly calls them, but changes her mind. Then Natalie does what any teen girl would do if she just saw her friends attacked by monsters: she undresses, and goes out to the family pool to swim in the middle of the night. Gotta love movie logic.

Once Natalie enters the pool, Neanderthal Man(iac) is seen watching her from the bushes. Before he can grab her, Nat dives under the water, and swims toward an inner tube. Oh, and she never sees or hears him during this scene, even after he growls in frustration. Oh, and did I mention that he resembles a shaggy version of comedian Daniel Tosh? Yup.

Natalie starts to fall asleep on the inner tube, until drops of blood hit her in the face. She opens her eyes and sees that it's raining blood. Horrified, she tries to get out of the pool, but gets pulled under. No surprises...it was only a dream. How original. Natalie wakes up for real, and it really is raining this time. The scene just ends there.

The next day at the park, the cops are looking for evidence to either support or disprove Natalie's tale. Since it rained the night before, I seriously doubt they'll find anything. Damn, they heard me! Wiley finds a bunch of "gook", which he collects in an evidence bag. No bodies, though.

Paula, the girl with the monster fixation, is scolded by her mother for oversleeping. The phone rings, and Paula speaks to her friend Gary. He tells her about the kids who vanished in the park, and that there was also no blood.

At school that same day, Steven sees Natalie between classes, but doesn't get an opportunity to speak to her. Some generic girl asks Natalie about what happened, but she doesn't really say much about the previous night. Then Paula shows up, hoping to get all of the gruesome details of the incident. Steven watches the entire conversation, then goes to class.

At lunch, Steven continues to get all googly-eyed at Natalie. A friend of his named Gene tells him to ask her out, because every girl who just saw most of her friends killed would LOOOOOOVE to go out on a date right afterwards. Oh, and then we meet a pretty aggressive girl named Donna. She's pissed at Natalie because her brother, Ray, is among the missing. She demands answers, and attacks Natalie when she doesn't get the answers that she wants. Steven leaps up tp defend Natalie, who gathers her books up and leaves the cafeteria. The school then informs Natalie that she should stay home until the investigation is finished, so she walks home and locks herself inside.

After school, Paula and some of her geeky friends(John, Wendy and a kid who looks like a young Ron Howard) meet up at a graveyard. They're making a movie. About vampires. In broad freakin' daylight. Oh movie, how I love your sheer stupidity. Paula calls Natalie after the filming is done, but gets hung up on.

Steven is holed up in his room practicing on a guitar(for you young'uns, guitars are the things that you play REAL music on, as opposed to the plastic ones you get when you buy Guitar Hero. See? You just learned something!), when there's a knock on his door. It's his sister, telling him that his father needs him to fill in for an employee who didn't show up at the grocery store.

Natalie gets another phone call, this time from one of the distraught parents. Natalie gets upset, then throws a glass of milk. Very dramatic stuff. I bet she was nominated for Best Actress for this scene.

Paula decides to ride her bicycle over to the crime scene, to have a look around. She finds some green slime almost immediately and dips her fingers in it. Give this gal a Nobel Prize for overall intelligence! She gets back on her bike.

Steven looks over the list of groceries he has to deliver(wait, that's a real job?), and sees that Natalie is on the list. He puts on his coolest shades, some make-out music, then rings her doorbell. She's out in the backyard by the pool, so she doesn't hear him at the door. Something tells me that Stevie-boy doesn't mind making a special trip to see her in a bikini. Hell, he even insists on putting all of the groceries away for her. They talk, and he tells her that he believes her story. Then he strikes gold, getting her to agree to go to a movie that evening. Go Steve!

Then we return to Paula. She's found more slime(yellow this time), and tracked it to the mysterious door where the fisherman found the cards. She decides to look around the bridge, and follows a path to yet another mystery door, which is surrounded by dead birds. She gets snatched, but not by a Maniac...a cop finds her and questions her. He soon lets her go home, which she apparently can't do unless one hand is firmly holding her baseball cap onto her head. I want to like her character in this, but does she have to be a COMPLETE dork?? Another cop brings Paula her bicycle, and she heads home, only to be scolded by her parents before they go out to dinner.

The idiot cops from the previous scene are still at the bridge, when one gets attacked by the Maniac with the ropes. After he gets strangled to death, Paula approaches the squad car, only to find the other cop missing as well. She finds a good hiding spot, then watches the door underneath the bridge for any activity.Some of the Maniacs emerge, including 2 that I think were the police officers. Then it starts to rain, and we discover that water is their big weakness...it makes 'em melt.

We briefly see a pointless scene with Lieutenant Devin listening to the recording of Natalie's interrogation session, then it switches back to Paula, who has run all the way home. She goes over the footage of the Maniacs that she just took, but nothing shows up.

Steven's van died, so he and Natalie take a subway for their big date. Paula, in the meantime, tries to make a plan to protect herself against the Maniacs. She lists their weaknesses as "garlic", "crucifix", and "mirrors"...um, Paula? Didn't you just see what WATER did to them? It's kind of a good starting point, dipshit!

The Maniacs show up at the subway station, and use "magic" to enter. A guy in the ticket booth just watches the bizarre group as they pass him. Steven and Natalie find the subway platform deserted, so they pass the time by chatting. Natalie catches a brief glimpse of a Maniac wielding a spear, but Steven calms her down and they share a kiss.

Too bad Steven's kisses aren't magic, because the Maniacs arrive at the same time as the subway train does. Steve and Nat climb aboard, keeping an eye out for any Maniacs in the nearby vicinity. Except for the teens, all of the other compartments seem to be deserted. As Steven makes a remark about the engineer being normal like them, the Maniacs attack the engineer. Jinx!

While the teens try to figure out the reason the monsters keep attacking Natalie, the Maniacs appear in the next subway car. Steven suggests trying to get help from the engineer, but he's now a Maniac as well. The rest of the Maniacs closely pursue the teens, until Steven uses his belt to tie the next doors they pass through shut.

Sadly, they didn't plan on some of the Maniacs being in cars AHEAD of them as well. Samurai Maniac confronts them from the front, and the other Maniacs cut through the belt and emerge from the door behind the unhappy couple. Uh oh. As the Maniacs prepare to kill the teens, the emergency brakes operate, throwing everyone off-balance.

The exits open, allowing Steven and Natalie to escape. Most of the Maniacs chase them, with the exception of the one driving(I assume) and Samurai. I guess they just wanted to enjoy the ride. Steve and Nat get on a bus, make sure the driver's a human, then try to calm their nerves. In the least-surprising moment so far, a Maniac arm crashes through a bus window to put Steven in a headlock. The arm starts to smoke and dissolve(????), and after a brief struggle, Steven throws it out the window. A guy walking his dog sees it, and mutters that he needs to move out of the neighborhood. Hardy-har.

Devin calls Wiley to tell him that the key to the murders in the park is Natalie. After waking him up with this obvious fact, he tells Wiley to go back to sleep. Ass.

Paula, asleep in her bed, is woken by someone in the house. It's a Maniac. She feigns sleep until he gets near the bed, then she leaps up with a crucifix thrust out in front of her. When the monster just stares at it dumbly, she goes to her back-up plan: a squirt gun. She shoots water at the face of the thing, and it staggers backwards into a bathtub. Yeesh, these Maniacs are dumb! Paula fills the tub and watches the Maniac melt.

The next morning, Steven wakes up on Natalie's couch. He hears glass breaking, and runs into the kitchen to see if she's in trouble. Nope. She dropped a plate. Why can't this chick enter a kitchen without breaking stuff??? After some pleasantries, Natalie lets him take a shower. Rowr! I wonder if she joins him?

Paula arrives at Natalie's front door, and gets it slammed in her face....until she describes how the Maniacs came after her. She tells them about the way water damages the Maniacs, then all 3 take turns saying, "Water." I guess this movie was intended for the Sesame Street demographic. Water.

Paula brings them to the mystery door, where Detective Wiley just happens to be staking out the location from a safe distance, with his trusty binoculars. He then follows them as they drive around in Steven's delivery van. Together, Steven, Paula and Natalie hatch the dumbest plan in the history of dumb plans: As a group. they're going to go to a "Battle of the Bands" competition, and hand out squirt guns to the audience, thereby aming it "the safest place to be". Ummmm....okay, whatever. This movie hurts my brain.

At the competition, everyone is dressed in costumes for no discernible reason. Steven's in one of the bands, which is a pretty good gig for a guy who started the film as a social outcast. Paula's watching from a high vantage point above the crowd, and Natalie is near the front of the crowd with the friend who picked her up at the police station. The other band competing is a generic hair band.

The music is excruciating. Let's just leave it at that, mmm-kay?

The mystery door opens, and the Maniacs emerge, more than a dozen by now. Given how slow they move, I'm pretty sure no one will get hurt until the sequel arrives. Steven's band finishes torturing my ears with their awfulness, then the lights go out. When they come up again, the hair band plays a song that sounds like a roomful of cats being tortured.

Wiley's still keeping an eye on the teens from his car when the Maniacs make their way down the street. He somehow missed spotting them, because they get into the school by loudly smashing windows. They make their way through the school, until they spot an oblivious janitor or security guard watching a baseball game. A Doctor Maniac sneaks up on him with a rag dipped in ether, knocks him out, then performs "surgery" on him, ripping out his entrails.

The second band finishes at about the same time the guard gets his heart ripped out. Steven gets a lucky kiss from Natalie before he joins his band for their second song, then Nat decides to get some fresh air. She enters a restroom, unaware that there are Maniacs roaming nearby.

Steven's band plays a sappy ballad next, while a punk rocker gets mowed down and dragged away by the Motorcycle Maniac. Then Natalie is spooked when another girl enters the bathroom. Nat rejoins her friend to watch Steven sing. Then the Maniacs start to mingle with the crowd. Paula finally sees one start to drag Natalie's friend away, and she and Natalie get Steven's attention.

Steven tries to get the audience to arm their water pistols, but a Commando Maniac bursts in and starts shooting at the crowd. Detective Wiley hears the commotion, and grabs his gun. Sadly, no one in the audience does. They stampede like wild cattle, and many are either trampled or taken by Maniacs.

Wiley finally gets inside and faces down the Reptile Maniac. Before he can shoot it, Doctor Maniac slits his throat with a scalpel. Stephen helps another student tackle a Maniac, but Steven drops his gun in the process. Paula tries to grab it for him, but the crowd kicks it around the floor. Just as the Maniac gets up again and grabs an ax, Paula uses an emergency firehose to decapitate it with a rush of water.

In an interesting twist, Reptile Maniac uses the hook it carries to attack Samurai, dragging him across the floor. Paula takes down several more Maniacs with the hose, and Steven convinces Natalie that they should escape while they can. Nice friends. Within seconds, the auditorium is empty, making Paula realize that her "friends" left her behind.

On the stairwell, Steven pauses to break out another firehose. He drags it to the stairs, then turns on the water. Sure enough, a Maniac tries to come upstairs, and is swiftly zapped by the water. Steven and Natalie hide in a science classroom, and the Noose guy quickly catches up. He doesn't find them, and vents his anger by bashing lockers in the corridor. Our young couple decide to start making out.

After several shots establish just how empty the school is(hint: it's EMPTY) Paula emerges from the auditorium and leaves. The movie cuts back to the police station, where angry parents are demanding to know what happened to their missing children. Paula, Steven and Natalie give their story to Devlin, who clearly doesn't buy it. Then he makes a call, and gets a team of cops and firefighters to the building the Maniacs where they first appeared. All are armed with water pistols and firehoses.

They get the mystery door opened and enter the building, with Devlin in the lead. They get spooked by a bird, then Devlin suggests that they should all split into smaller groups. They find several abandoned vehicles and a lot of junk, but no Maniacs. Devlin clears everyone out, then has one of his men take the kids home.

Devlin goes back in alone, and stops next to an old truck. He wanders through the place again, and spots a light flashing from the back of a delivery truck. Opening the rear doors, he finds Lizard waiting for him, and it drags him inside. As Devlin screams, the doors to both the truck and the building close again. Driving home, Steven advises the girls to keep their squirt guns, in case they ever need to fight off Maniacs again. THE END.

Wow. It's a tough movie to rate. On the one hand, some of the Maniacs were well-designed, and there were several kills, making for a high body count. On the other hand, the movie was silly as Hell, and there's no really interesting backstory to explain where the Maniacs came from, or why they were so infatuated with Natalie. And why did the reptilian one change sides toward the end, only to go bad again? And what made them "neon" in any way, shape or form? Why not call the film Hydrophobic Maniacs? Or Teen Girl Stalker Maniacs? Or Golden Gate Bridge Maniacs, since they emerged from underneath it?

Well, despite the many, many dumb things that are in this movie, I still got a kick out of it. Goofy horror films were in their heyday in the 1980's, and this one fits right in with movies like Night of the Creeps, Monster Squad and Night of the Comet. I'll rate it about 3.5 killer trees out of 5. If I hadn't been left with so many questions at the end, it would've probably scored a point higher just for the sheer goofiness of it all.

And what did the Neon Maniacs teach me this week?

-Squirt guns are lethal to monsters.
-So is music from nearly 30 years ago.
-Any guy can win the affection of any girl, as long as they live in the 1980's.

Up next on my queue is a film called The Groundskeeper. Maybe it'll be good(he says with much doubt).Have a good week!

Final Curtain

Okay, so last week I mentioned that this week's DVD has 2 movies on it. Those movies are The Bonesetter Returns and Final Curtain, both of which are ultra-low-budget affairs. I more or less just flipped a coin, so you're going to suffer through Final Curtain with me, as I wasn't sure that I wanted to see a sequel to a movie about a killer I've never heard of before. I'll be SPOILING the entire film more than pretty much every film Ben Stiller's presence has ruined, so beware! (okay, to be fair, I enjoyed Mystery Men....but that was about it...)

The movie begins with someones Grampa trying to learn how to type on a computer, as music from a feminine hygiene ad plays at an ear-bleeding volume. Gramps pees into a drinking glass as he tries to figure out what all them tiny symbols on the cotton-pickin' screen do when you click on 'em(DAGNABBIT!!), then decides that suicide would be preferable to having to learn how to use Windows. He holds the gun barrel to his temple for so long, I actually started to wonder if he forgot what we was doing, and might wander away to watch "Matlock" or something.

Alas, Gramps does eventually pull the trigger. Before we go to opening credits, we see that he was typing "A MIRTH IN THE FAMILY BY VICTOR JAMESON". Wait, wasn't Mirth the name of the baby that Mork and Mindy had? Why the frickenfrack would he be writing a Mork fanfic? Well, at least it justifies the suicide...

SEVERAL YEARS LATER(as the movie tells us) a guy who looks like a roadie for Motley Crue approaches a building at night. Thrilling. He enters the building(which turns out to be a theatre) and then subjects us to a painfully awkward "reporter" talking into a black dildo. She tells the sex toy that A Mirth in the Family is a play, and that a disgraced director named Sanford Ash will be using the play as his comeback. Motley starts mopping the floor, then senses someone watching him. He shrugs it off, then stops a few more times to make a series of perplexingly goofy faces. After that he goes outside to have a smoke break, and an unseen stalker attacks him from behind. Oh, and a puddle of fruit punch "blood" flows onto the street from under the door. I guess our killer left his sippy cup in the dishwasher tonight.

Okay, I know we're less than 5 minutes into this thing, but I'm officially rooting for the killer.

We finally get to the credits. This thing has a cast of non-thousands, and the music starts getting to you after awhile as well. Not good signs. It actually gets sort of depressing, watching this huge font proudly declare the names of people I'll never see again.

Anyway, after the Bataan Death March of Obscurity ends, we see some building. It's supposed to be something called the Kanata Playhouse, where the previously mentioned play will be staged. It's being brought to the "playhouse" by someone with the unlikely name of Sanford Ash.

At the entrance we get to meet Heidi McMillan and Jim Miller, the young leads in the play. After a painful introduction, they step inside the theatre to meet everyone else in the cast and crew. There's Sanford Ash, whose voice and demeanor often reach Shatnerian proportions; Jen, Sanford's frazzled and overworked assistant; Natasha, a melodramatic stage actress with the worst fake accent I've ever heard; Barry, another actor who sounds like a snake-oil salesman; and a pair of female stagehands whose names I must have missed, because I couldn't tell you who they were if you paid me.

Once everyone has been introduced, Ash recites a speech that would make "Star Trek"'s Data seem warm and fuzzy. When he's finally done with his "robot voice", he and the others briefly discuss the supposed curse associated with the play: Apparently, the writer, before he killed himself, wrote in his suicide note that the play would never be performed. Since then, any time an attempt has been made to stage the thing, an accident or two have managed to close it down. Sounds like that "Spider-Man" musical...

Backstage, the 2 female workers complain about Sanford Ash and his attitude. As they open a closet to put away cleaning supplies, neither one sees the corpse of the scruffy guy just hanging there, in plain view. Yeah, that makes sense!

At 9 that evening, Natasha finds herself alone on the stage. There was supposed to be a read-through of the play, but she was the only one who showed up. Behind her, someone approaches while wielding a rather large blade. She begins talking into her hand, Barry tries to kill her, and it turns out that it's all part of the play.

They take a short break, and Jim seems bamboozled when Heidi mentions a granola bar. Once alone, Heidi nearly has a run-in with a black-clad figure I can only assume is the killer, but nothing happens. Then we find out that Natasha is wearing a wig due to cancer treatments, and that she and Sanford Ash shop at the same boutique for clothes. Oh, and we discover that Sanford and Natasha were once married, and that Jen and Jim used to date. I guess not all the daytime soaps were cancelled after all!

Jen goes upstairs to look for Heidi, and catches a glimpse of the killer. She then finds Heidi slumped in a chair, either dead or close to it. Barry rushes in when Jen screams, and he confirms that Heidi is, indeed, deader than a doornail. When the rest of the group enter, they see that Heidi's wrists are slashed, but the weapon is nowhere to be found. It's....MURDERRRR!!! Oh, and the phones are dead and the exits are all locked.

Another figure is seen lurking in the dark, this time dressed in white. The killer again, or someone new? Everyone splits up into pairs to double-check the exits, and Barry leaves Natasha alone to see if he can get the lights working. Then Jim and Jen split up to check the doors on opposite sides of the room they're in. Uhhhh, what happened to pairing off to remain safe?

While Natasha freaks out over Barry not coming back, he scares her half to death by actually returning. A masked figure is spotted, and Jim pursues him into the building's basement. Oh, and Natasha is almost killed by a falling light fixture, moments before Sanford rushes in. As everyone turns on each other to take turns at being accused of murder, Jen FINALLY realizes that Jim has vanished.

The figure that Jim is chasing somehow has time to change from a black costume to a red one. Nice continuity, movie. Oh wait, it's just the lighting. When Jim catches up to the guy, a fight breaks out. Jim gets kicked in the crotch, and the other guy runs away just as the others come to the rescue.

Barry offers Natasha a seat, then confesses that he loves her. As she tries to let him down easy, the killer is working backstage, trying to set up another murder. Another stage light comes swinging at Natasha, this time decapitating her. Jim runs after the stranger, this time catching up to him, but the stranger starts to get the upper hand. Then the others arrive, the stranger releases Jim, and Jim punches the guy so hard it knocks him out.

The stranger, who goes by the name Lawrence, wakes up. He tells them that he lives in the theatre, because his father used to be the caretaker of the place. Good logic there. After they question Lawrence about the killings, he turns the tables by claiming that they are more likely to be murder suspects. Then the lights go out. When they come on again, Sanford is missing.

Sanford has gone under the stage area, armed with a cigarette lighter. Jim and Jen decide to go looking for him, leaving Barry in charge of watching the prisoner. When the couple do find Sanford, he claims that he left to see if he could fix the lights. All 3 open the door leading to the circuit breakers, and the body of the Motley Crue dude falls out. Unfortunately, the control panel is also dead, and a quick check upstairs reveals that Barry and Lawrence are both missing now.

It turns out that Barry has taken Lawrence for a walk. Lawrence claims to have a set of keys for the doors, and Barry wants to get out of the building first. Lawrence convinces Barry to untie him, and the others catch up to them. After Barry tells them about the spare set of keys, the lights go out. Again. When they come up again, Jim has a gaping wound in his neck. Oh, and both Barry and Sanford have blood on their clothes.

Lawrence tries to throw suspicion their way, but no one believes him. The 4 survivors get to a door, but then a strange noise freaks them out. Sanford leaves the group, claiming that he wants to avenge Natasha's murder. Barry then goes after Sanford, leaving Jen alone with Lawrence. She stays with him at the door, ignoring the fact that everyone suspected him of murder about 5 minutes ago.

Sanford gets to the stage, and shouts for the killer to face him. The camera zooms in, then fades to black as we hear him say, "Ooooh-aaaah!" Geez, the guy can't even DIE without hamming it up! Shatner would be proud.

Lawrence tries all of his keys on the door, but none of them work. As a back-up plan, he tells Jen that he knows of a secret exit in the theatre. Unfortunately, it involves climbing around in the ceiling air ducts. They crawl around in the ducts for a short while, then the tunnel collapses under their weight. They "fall" into a back room, then hear Sanford scream.

A hand "stabs" Sanford, just before Jen and Lawrence find him. Barry then appears, covered in blood, and delivers a speech that seems cribbed from several episodes of Scooby-Doo and Murder, She Wrote. His motive was that he loved Natasha, but Sanford stole her from him. The usual jealousy thing, blah blah blah. Whatever.Lawrence and Jen take off, and Barry pursues them. Lawrence pushes Jen ahead, then turns around to fight Barry. Their fight is mostly in shadow, so it's pointless to try to figure out what's happening in this scene.

Jen, still running, decides to climb a ladder and hide above the stage. Lawrence comes looking for her, but Barry leaps at him, and they fight some more. Then Lawrence limps away to find himself a good hiding spot as well. Barry sees him, and throws a blade at him as he tries to get away, stabbing him in the back.

Jen peeks out from her hiding place, sees her shadow, and we get 6 more weeks of watching a dreary movie. Damn! She pokes her head out again, and Barry taunts her from an unknown position, promising to kill her quickly, because he likes her. Then he reveals an actual plot twist: he had a partner helping him? But who could it be???

A female hand grabs Jen, providing a big hint. It was Heidi, the starry-eyed young actress. Looking back at her death scene, it seems pretty obvious now...I mean, it was Barry who checked her pulse, after all. Oh, and that leads to ANOTHER twist I didn't see coming: Barry is Heidi's father. Boy, if the rest of the film had been written like this, the movie might have been almost watchable!

It also turns out that the play itself gave Barry a scheme for his revenge, due to it being "cursed" and all. Before they kill Jen, she wants to know one final detail...why did they bother killing the janitor at the start of the film? Both Barry and his daughter look perplexed, and claim that they didn't even know he was dead. Whodunnit???

A shower of electrical sparks fall from the ceiling, and the building starts shaking(my mind was aching, and we were faking it was YOU who shook me alllllll niiiight loooooong!), and a horribly fake explosion is seen from outside the theatre. When the dust settles, we get brief glimpses of Barry, Heidi and Jen, all dead. Then the credits roll. During the credits, we see the reporter with the weird eyes again, asking several people what they they think of Ash, and it's all pretty pointless and strange. Oh, and to add insult to injury, those 2 women who worked backstage weren't even given NAMES! No wonder I couldn't identify them....the freaking maker of the film didn't even do it. And don't get me started on the way he ripped off Sam Raimi in the credits...geez, this Brett Kelly guy has balls of TITANIUM instead of brass! And what about that ending! Did the play have some kind of demonic force behind it that killed the last few characters? Was it the ghost of the playwright, Victor Jameson? Was it just some freak earthquake? I mean, if you're going to try to give your MacGuffin some kind of cool backstory, SHOW it your audience!!!

Okay okay, I'm done venting. I'm not going to bother with the other film on the DVD...I learned my lesson about no-budget films, thanks! Just for making a film, I'll be generous and give it 1 killer tree out of 5, and that's a gift, considering that the film lacked any real gore, acting, or any semblance of a cool idea that was actually followed up in a satisfactory way. And what did this travesty teach me ths week?

-That you can have a high body count, and somehow botch nearly every kill in the film.

-All theatre people talk like the Master Thespian character that Jon Lovitz used to play. Google it, young'uns, it's totally worth it.

-Movies you make with your friends should stay private. Forever.

Okay, so now that I'm skipping that Bonesetter thing, my next slasher film will be an '80's horror flick called Neon Maniacs. Sounds great, see you next week!

Cutting Class

As I've pointed out before, it's not uncommon to see famous actors in horror films--especially early in their careers. This week's slasher, Cutting Class, is no exception. It stars none other than Brad Pitt, caught up in a love triangle while a killer is on the loose. Was it a legend of the fall, or did it seem like it was written by twelve monkeys? Read this incredibly SPOILERY article to find out!

The film begins with a teen girl grabbing the morning paper, which has a headline on the front page about a local boy who is being released from a mental hospital, where doctors were trying to figure out whether or not he killed his father. I'll be completely honest, though: I'm much too busy staring at this hot chick. She's like a sex-kitten version of Winona Ryder, which is NEVER a bad thing, in my book! Anyway, her name is Paula, and her father(played by the always-funny Martin Mull) is about to embark on a week-long hunting trip. We also discover that her dad's a district attorney....I'll bet that becomes a plot point later...

At a bar near his hunting spot, Dad reveals that he's hunting bloodthirsty, ravenous, killer...ducks. All of this over some DUCKS??? An elderly man who hears about his goal smears some mud and worm-guts all over Dad's clothing, supposedly to mask the scent of the city. Uhhh, thanks?

Out in the middle of a bog, Mull misses a few ducks, then hears a young man calling to him from an undisclosed location. Although Mull doesn't realize it yet, the stranger is armed with a bow and some arrows. He fires one, and it lands in Mull's abdomen. He keels over, clutching the arrow's entry point as some fog rolls by.

Next, we get a VERY young-looking Brad Pitt putting some corny '80's pop music into his cassette player, then driving to school. He nearly hits another vehicle because he was distracted, then almost kills a kid riding a Big Wheel. Oh, and he then taunts the kid's mother before he drives away, which isn't particularly bright.

He arrives at the high school late, and enters his chemistry class while the teacher is demonstrating the danger of mixing certain chemicals together. The teacher asks him a question, and we find out that Pitt's name in this is "Dwight". Okay, Dwight it is. A nerd sitting near Dwight stage-whispers every answer to him, even the simple ones. The teacher makes a piece of sodium explode, and a boy in the back of the class seems pretty interested. Whee. Learning is fun, kids.

While Dwight is busy suffering through Chemistry 101, Paula is preparing her fine hot self for gym class. She knocks over an archery display on her way to the gym, and notices that one of the arrows has a wet leaf sticking to it. Gee, I wonder where it was recently used?

In the actual gymnasium, Paula gets up on a balance beam and starts walking in her shorts and tight shirt. Thank you, lord, for reading my mind. The quiet kid from the back of the chemistry class, Brian, stares at Paula(Get in line, dude!), so the coach tells him to climb a nearby rope until he reaches the top. Dwight(boy, that chemistry class must have been about a minute long...) gets under the rope and starts swinging it around.

Can you guess what happens next? If you guessed "Brian falls off of the rope, and miraculously escapes serious injury", you win! *DINGDINGDING* When Brian falls, the coach somehow blames HIM for the accident, and makes him do 30 push-ups. Luckily, Paula's still posing on her beam, so at least he has a nice distraction...

After school, which apparently consisted of just 2 classes, Paula, Dwight and another girl go to a local burger joint that looks like something from "Happy Days". Things go a bit sour when Brian appears and is confronted by Paula's top-heavy friend Colleen, until Dwight suggests to Paula that they party at her house. Colleen and Paula both pressure Dwight to give Paula his class ring, but Paula settles for a hot dog when Dwight starts getting nervous. The nanosecond he leaves, Brian pops up again, presenting her with a hot dog. Dwight returns, sees what Brian did, and yells at the girls to get in the car. Before they leave, Dwight threatens Brian.

At Paula's home, Dwight puts on some of Martin Mull's clothes. Then he makes a penis joke and tries to get Paula to have sex in her father's bed. She wisely refuses. Good, now her family won't have to pay for a shrink, when she inevitably represses the memory of screwing her boyfriend, who was dressed as her father.

The next scene is back at school, showing the principal sniffing what looks like a pair of panties while making morning announcements. Paula shows up a little bit tardy for an art class, where she'll be disrobing and posing...wait, did I just type that? And this is in high school? Where was this class when I was a teenager?

Dwight, of course, objects to Paula disrobing, but the teacher tells him to get to his own class. Yeah, Dwight...don't ruin this for me! Awwww, she's wearing a black leotard. Oh well, she still looks great. The art teacher has her bend over, which brings Brian out of hiding. He was crouched behind a statue, and he grabs it by the breasts when it accidentally tips over. *snicker*


The teacher calls Brian to the head of the class, and makes him pose next to Paula. They get dangerously close, and we get to see Brian's "Oh!" face.(if you don't know what that is, rent the movie Office Space. Trust me, it's worth it.)

Between classes, Paula is selling tickets to a basketball game. When a middle-aged portly student starts giving her the third degree about refunds, the principal arrives, probably to tell him to stop lurking in high schools. The principal then asks Paula to stop by his office after school. When she enters the office, he's hiding behind a coat rack. Um, okaaaaay...He has her pick up a cheerleading uniform off of the floor, just so he can stare up her skirt.

Brian walks past a bunch of lockers, hitting them with a stick, and looking like a zombie. Then the scene cuts to the art teacher, cleaning up. He has a series of fresh busts put away, and a kiln the size of a 7-11. When he enters the giant oven to move the last bust, he is pushed into the oven, and the door is slammed shut. Then the killer cranks up the temperature gauge, and we get a big serving of Teacher Steak. Well done, of course.

Paula gets in her car, and Dwight jumps up from the backseat. Lucky for her, he only plants a kiss on her cheek, as opposed to, you know, strangling her or something. Paula tells him about being put in charge of the new cheerleading uniforms, and Dwight suggests that they celebrate. When Paula tells him no, he vaguely threatens her by saying, "I don't get mad, I get even..."

Dwight exits her car, and tries to get back into the school to retrieve a textbook. The janitor, Shultz, taunts him, then walks away, leaving Dwight pounding on the front door. A couple of Dwight's friends show up, and all three decide to leave to get some beer and party.

Back inside the school, Shultz pushes his cart down the hall, then stops at a classroom and dons a pair of work gloves. He makes a comment about "dirty work", which makes me wonder: is he going into the art room? Hmmm....

At home, Paula gets up to answer the front door, but there's no one there. She looks around a bit, and sees someone across the street, lurking in the bushes. When she shuts the door, the figure steps out in the open a little bit. It looks like Brian, but I'm not 100% sure, so don't hold me to it.

There's another knock. It turns out to be Dwight, Colleen, and Colleen's boyfriend Background Extra #2. Dwight asks to borrow Paula's key to the school files, and she makes him exchange it for his beloved ring. After the exchange, Paula refuses to go with them, which seems kind of stupid, considering that she'll probably be held responsible for any mischief they create while in possession of her key. Also, what good is the key if they're still not able to enter the school in the first place? Seriously, does their plan even make sense???

As Dwight and his friends start to leave, they reveal that they took Paula's textbook with them. She sheepishly exits the house, and joins them on the adventure. As they take off down the road, Brian rides his little-girl bicycle in the opposite direction. seriously, the only thing it's missing is a big pink basket. The tassels on the handlebars are a nice touch, though.

At school, the kids break a window. Okay, I guess that answers my last question. Shultz hears them while he's buffing the floor, but doesn't catch them. They race down a few generic hallways, then enter the principal's office, where they look at their personal files. Dwight finds Brian's file, and they discover that he was heavily medicated, given shock treatments, and was diagnosed as a Nucking Futcase. Brian is watching them from behind a watercooler, which they somehow all fail to notice(Colleen even gets a cup of water, and remains oblivious!!)...

They leave the office without putting anything away(real smart!), and Background Extra #2 ducks into the teacher's lounge to photocopy some of the files. Dwight, who magically arrived before the other teen, watches him from a shadowy corner. He must be the son of Jason, with teleportation powers like that.

The next day in math class, Brian is handed a pair of electrodes, then Colleen mocks him by pretending to be electrocuted. Charming. Dwight is questioned by the teacher, who doesn't buy his story about the janitor refusing to let him get his math book. To make matters worse, Brian then gives the teacher the correct answer, which just serves to piss Dwight off even more.

Outside, the science teacher has the class identifying birds and plants and shit. He actually walks right over Paula's father, who gasps. Wow, he's still alive? He gasps again to try to get them to see or hear him, but the teacher claims that it was the mating call of a bullfrog. Dwight is the last to leave the swampy area, but he only stops to pick up a snake. Paula's father passes out. Or dies.

That night, everyone's at the big basketball game. Dwight meets a guy looking to give him a possible basketball scholarship, and nearly blows it by being late for practice. Something happened to get Dwight ejected from the game, but the DVD glitched up at that point. When it started playing normally again, Brian began lurching up the bleachers like Frankenstein's Monster, glaring at Paula. If anyone has a working DVD and can tell me what I missed, I'd appreciate it.

Anyway, Paula's friend Colleen is somehow dragged under the bleachers(she thinks it's her boyfriend, I guess, although the DVD once again stuttered and glitched up), and she sees her boyfriend get his throat slit. With her screams covered by the crowd noise, Colleen is then dragged into the shadows and killed.

Outside, Dwight is sitting in the car, with his head pressed against the steering wheel. He asks Paula who won the game, then they start to make out. That's exactly when Brian shows up next to the car. He makes a noise that scares Paula, but neither she nor Dwight ever see him. She asks Dwight to drive her home.

As he's mopping up after the game, Shultz finds a sticky puddle that looks like blood. He even smells it. Oh, and he mumbles something too, but the captions don't have it, and endless rewinding doesn't quite make it clear enough to make out. Hope it wasn't important...

The next day, a shop class is studying car brakes. As luck would have it, Brian is working under Dwight's car, and Dwight joins him to make sure that he doesn't try anything funny. Then the two boys actually have a somewhat wistful conversation about the days when they were still close friends. Brian implies that Dwight may have done something to alter his father's car, but the chat ends with both guys laughing. Weird.

Back in the swamp, Martin Mull has actually stayed alive, and is trying to limp his way back to civilization. He teeters once or twice, but remains standing. Wow, I guess he has 9 lives!

In math class, Paula tells Dwight about Colleen's disappearance, but he shrugs off her concern. During the chat, the teacher has been trying to get Dwight to answer a math problem, and confronts him in front of the entire class. Brian then tries to defend Dwight, and the teacher ejects both of them from his class.

In the hallway, Brian tries to make peace with Dwight, but doesn't get a friendly response. Dwight is called into the vice principal's office first(or maybe she's A guidance counselor, at this point could care less), and Paula arrives to sit with Brian. She sets his mind at ease, then Dwight ruins the moment by storming out of the office and taking off down the corridor.

Brian is called into the office, and he's told that none of his teachers like him. When she tries to tell him that they just want to help him, he swears at her(it's a great line that I won't ruin for you here) and is promptly suspended. So wait, if anyone else dies in school now, can we rule Brian out as the killer?

As Dwight and Paula cut through the gymnasium, Shultz yells at them about their shoes scuffing the floor that he just cleaned. He makes a dramatic exit, then ruins it by continuing to turn back to them and keep yammering mindless threats. Dwight leaves Paula at the door to the locker room, and tells her that he's going to study harder, now that whatever I missed during the basketball scene cost him a scholarship.

In the dark room with the copy machine, the woman who suspended Brian is assaulted. She is grabbed by her head, and her face is smashed into the copy machine, which creates several pictures of her various stages of death. It's actually kind of creative, considering that many of the early deaths were so bloodless.

In a school bathroom, Dwight has another run-in with Brian. This is going to sound weird, but they seem to be trying to compete at washing up. You have to see it to believe it....and even then, you'll be scratching your head in bewilderment.

Paula finds the body at the copy machine and screams, which brings Dwight, Brian and a small crowd of onlookers. As Dwight tries to check for any signs that the body might not be dead, he points at Brian and names him as the killer. Dwight chases him down the hall, and both boys end up in a storage area that resembles an S&M dungeon. Hilariously, Brian walks right past the exit while searching for it, and Dwight corners the principal, who is dressed like a cross between Carmen Miranda and Mozart. Dwight sees Brian escape the area, and continues the chase outside.

Somehow, out in a wide open area, Brian shakes off Dwight. The police get involved, and it's now a huge manhunt. Martin Mull shows up again, and is found by a police dog. In a scene that defies all logic and sense, he manages to scare off the dog and avoid any kind of rescue AGAIN.

The town holds a meeting at the high school, and angry parents arrive holding copies of the photocopied woman's dead face. Dwight's dad demands that the principal bring Brian to justice, and Dwight embellishes what he witnessed under pressure from his dad.

Behind the school, the janitor's busy trashing most of the photos in a dumpster. When he goes back inside, Brian emerges from underneath the trash, clinging to one of the pictures of the dead woman. He then rides his 10-speed Huffy to Paula's house, where she hears him in her driveway. She exits the house and finds no one there, then hears a weird noise as she goes from room to room. It turns out to be the little kid with the Big Wheel, who apparently has no curfew. Nice.

Upstairs Paula finds a recording of her father preparing his closing argument in Brian's criminal trial. He refers to Brian as "scum" and a "plague" on the tape. Boy, Brian's looking guiltier and guiltier. I hope there's some great plot twist coming up, because otherwise this is like Slasher Movies For Dummies thus far....

Ah, clarity! The next scene reveals that the dead woman, Mrs Knopf, WAS the vice principal after all. Paula finds Dwight in the auditorium, rehearsing lines for what I'm assuming is Drama Club. She hands him a pile of papers, which turn out to be documented transcripts from Brian's trial. As Brian watches from a hiding place, Paula reveals that Dwight was somewhat responsible for teaching Brian how to cut car brakes. Brian refused to name him in court, because he still wanted to believe that they were friends. Brian makes a noise that scares them off.

The next scene has tits. Nice ones. That is all.

In gym class, the teacher is helping Paula learn archery. Yeah, more like lechery, the way he's got her in his arms. Dwight shows up too, but is thrown out for not wearing his gym clothes. He also threatens to fail Dwight if he doesn't show up for a make-up class. Dwight starts to aim an arrow at the gym teacher when he walks away, but Paula calls his name, so he fires the arrow at a target instead. He gets a bull's-eye. A brief scene shows Paula's father still in the swamp, which is getting kind of dull at this point. Either escape or die, man.

Back at home, Paula finds Dwight at her front door. He's drunk as a skunk, and whining about his teachers. Paula gets him to leave, then prepares to strip down to her panties and wash her hair(!), but Brian walks in. He scares her, but then he begs her to help him find Mrs. Knopf's REAL killer. When Paula tries to get her hands on some scissors to defend herself with, Brian grabs them first.

In a surprise move, he tells her to stab him if she really believes that he killed his father. He then denies that he had anything to do with any of the other deaths and disappearances in the school. Paula starts to believe him.

Dwight's in a phone booth. He calls Paula to tell her that he's going after everyone who ruined his life. Then she discovers that Brian stayed in her room the entire night, apparently just to watch her sleep. He shows her the picture he was holding when he stepped out of the dumpster, and it clearly shows the killer wearing a class ring just like the one Dwight had. Wait, didn't he trade it to Paula for her key? I don't recall her giving it back to him. Weird. Anyway, both Paula and Brian agree that they need to find and help Dwight.

Dwight shows up at the gym to make up the class he "missed". He tells off his gym teacher then storms out, but promises to return. The gym teacher does what anyone in that situation would do--he gets on a trampoline. Meanwhile, Paula and Brian sneak back into the school, but the janitor finds them an attacks Brian with his mop. Paula runs away, and is nearly caught by Shulze. She makes her way to the second floor, then hides.

Back at the trampoline, the gym teacher fails to see the killer coming up behind him with a flagpole. In a scene that was apparently stolen several years later in the movie Grindhouse, the teacher is impaled when the pointy end of the flagpole is rammed through his crotch and ass. MAJOR ouch!!

Paula finds the bodies of both Colleen and her boyfriend tied together in a closet. Dwight then tracks her down, but she locks the door before he can open it. Paula escapes through a different door, only to run into the arms of one of her wacky teachers, the math teacher I think...boy, doesn't ANYONE skip school on a Saturday??? They hide in a classroom just seconds before Shultz shows up, holding his mop like a rifle. This movie is getting pretty damned crazy, isn't it?

Someone turns on the PA system and plays a goofy-sounding pop song that I guess was supposed to be scary somehow. Paula and the teacher run into a different class to try to escape via a window, but they all have bars on them. After doing this a few times, they wind up in a classroom where the killer has posted a word problem on the blackboard for them to solve. The math problem is this: "A train leaves Chicago at 8, heading east. Another train leaves Boston, heading west at 8. At what time will the trains collide? X equals 1 or 2." Oh, and did I mention that the exits are marked with a 1 and a 2? Because they are.

The math teacher decides to try and solve the problem, but has a meltdown when Paula tries to rush him. He eventually tells her that the answer is Door 1. He opens Door 1, then proudly looks at Paula, just before getting an axe planted in his face by Brian. After killing the math teacher, Brian starts bragging about how smart he is, then asks Paula to go out with him. Then he tells her his motives for the killing spree.

It boils down to this: Brian was hurt when Paula's father called him a murderer during the trial. But over the course of the 5 years he spent at the mental hospital, Brian decided to embrace the label, and make murdering his vocation. He then rambles on about being so good at murdering people that he can defy time and space to commit his evil acts. As he winds up his speech by threatening to kill Paula next, Brian is surprised by Dwight, who breaks the door open with an axe.

Dwight and Paula head straight for the nearest exit, but Brian chained it up tight. Then they break into the science lab, where Dwight formulates a plan. He has Paula get an overhead shower nozzle running while he desperately tries to find the huge chunk of sodium the science teacher used earlier in the week. He grabs the wrong rock and throws it at Brian, which does absolutely nothing.

They run away into the industrial arts department next, where they hide behind some equipment. Brian comes in after them, and turns on some of the equipment to cover the sound of him searching, and he surprises Dwight with a kick in the face. Both boys grab electric saws and start to duel, but Dwight has a malfunctioning one. He throws it at Brian, who then throws his at Dwight, using the distraction to hide.

Dwight waits for Brian to turn his back, then gets his neck in a stranglehold with a long rod that has a manacle-like device on it. Brian tells Dwight that he'll release him if he kills Paula. Dwight raises the saw, but flings it futilely at Brian instead. As Paula stands around like a ninny, Brian puts Dwight's head in a vise and starts twisting it tighter and tighter. Paula begs him to stop, and he leaves Brian flailing at the lever while he kisses Paula.

To buy Dwight more time, Paula starts to unbutton her blouse. She asks him to close his eyes while she undresses, and the bonehead actually complies! Okay, in his defense, he DOES open them again, to tell her not to hurt him, but still...and then he closes them again! Paula quickly grabs a nearby hammer and plants the sharp end into his forehead. She then pushes him into either a table saw or drill, which goes right into his back. There's blood EVERYWHERE!

Shultz shows up while Paula's easing the tight grip on Dwight's head. The janitor makes several attempts at sexual banter with Paula, which makes me wonder if maybe he was legally blind during the whole movie, and somehow I just never picked up on it. I mean, if I enter a room where one guy is dead, another guy is being tortured, and a chick is trying to escape, pick-up lines are probably pretty low on my list of priorities...

Paula and Dwight tell the cops how they solved the murders, and the only thing missing is a big cartoon dog making a hoagie in a marijuana-filled van. The couple leave the school, just as Martin Mull's character finally gets out of the damned swamp. He rolls down a pretty big hill at the same time that Dwight starts speeding up on the road, and that's when they discover that Brian DID manage to cut the brakes on the car. Thinking quickly, Dwight sends the car into a spin, and manages to stop it just before it hits Mull. Mull tells them that he can't wait to kill Brian for what he put him through, and they tell him that they already killed him. Then he yells at them for cutting class to go out joyriding. THE END

All in all, a pretty fun slasher flick. There were around 7-8 deaths, some of the gore was decent, and the lead was a pretty hot actress. I'm giving this one 4 and a half killer trees out of 5, with the hope that more movies from the late '80's/early '90's turn out to be this goofy and entertaining. Oh, and what did I learn from Cutting Class?

-Math kills

-So does salt.

-You can survive for a week after being shot by an arrow in a swamp. In fact, the longer you stay out there, the stronger you'll get!

The next DVD Netflix is sending me has 2 movies on it, so my movie next week is either The Bonesetter Returns or Final Curtain. Hopefully one of them will be as much fun to watch as this week's movie was. See you soon!

Wrong Turn 3

The first 2 Wrong Turn movies were pretty fun, gory experiences(despite some bad CGI in the 2nd one...a corpse split down the middle doesn't leave a trail of blood'n'guts when both halves are dragged away?), so I decided to give the 3rd one a try. How well does it compare to the previous entries? Well, prepare to be completely SPOILED and read on to find out!

The story starts out where you'd normally expect to find the second act: a group of friends are having a campout in the woods, complete with whitewater rafting, hiking, and general outdoorsy fun. Whee. The focus seems to be on a girl named Alex, as she's the only one who has a name so far. As the 2 girls decide to sunbathe(one going topless, showing off the best breasts money can buy these days), one of the male campers, Trey comes back. Alex leaves so that they can share some "quality time", and almost immediately Boob-Girl is shot through the fake breast with an arrow, impaling Trey's cupped palm in the process.

Alex hears all of the commotion and returns to the campsite, just in time to see another arrow fly through her friend's eye socket. She hides as the cannibal who fired the arrow bursts onto the scene to pick up the eyeball and taste it. Yum!

Trey keeps running, and the cannibal, named Three Finger(according to the Netflix sleeve) manages to corner him when he stumbles. The cannibal grabs a pole-like branch and shoves it into and through the guy's mouth and throat. Then he tastes Trey's blood and starts howling and screaming. Geez,keepyour pants on, dude!

Alex and the last male run through the woods, and the guy stops to lean against a tree for a moment, probably to catch his breath or to re-read the script to see if he ever had a name. As he resumes his escape, he sets off a trap that splits him vertically into three pieces. There's a token amount of CGI blood, which automatically makes this film better than the second one, at least. Three Finger finds him and starts lapping up his blood as well.

Meanwhile, another movie starts up, this time set at a nearby prison called Grafton Penitentiary. An inmate named Chavez is talking to a skinhead about a planned escape. They don't trust each other, but both are willing to set aside their differences for the chance to escape. Awww, I bet they become BFF's by the end of the film!

Back inside, the guards are changing into their uniforms and discussing the fact that one guard is leaving after today to move on to bigger and better things. The guard, Nate, is taking college courses, with the eventual goal of getting his degree in law. Whatever. Just get to the part where you idiots piss off a bunch of inbred cannibals, will ya? Anyway, Nate is told that the warden wants to see him...something about a prisoner transfer.

In the warden's office, it gets a bit more complicated than that. Apparently the warden knows about the planned escape attempt, so he has a U.S. Marshal in the prison posing as a convict. His plan is to get some of the key guys planning the escape on a bus, in the hope that they start talking about the specific details of their big plan. The warden wants Nate to go along, because he trusts Nate to keep everyone safe, in case anything should go wrong. Also, another Marshal will be there, dressed like a prison guard. Nate hates the idea of going along for this on his last shift, but agrees to anyway.

Then the movie introduces us to 2 MORE characters, a West Virginia sheriff and his cute female deputy. The deputy, Ally, takes a missing persons report down about the campers from the opening sequence. She offers to start the search for them, but the sheriff decides that he should stretch his muscles a bit, and takes a search dog named Leon with him.

Nate and another guard inform Chavez that he's taking a ride on the transport bus. He hates the news, but has little choice in the matter. Also along for the ride is a scrawny guy named Crawford; a young guy, Brandon, who supposedly killed some people after returning from a stint in Iraq; a black guard named Walter who seems pretty chummy with Nate; and all of the aforementioned would-be escapees and Feds.

They pull up at that sheriff's station after night falls, and it turns out that the sheriff knows Nate. As they drink coffee and hang out, it's revealed that Nate lived in the area until the age of 12. He and the sheriff discuss the route the bus will take, as the inmates annoy the cute deputy and each other in equal measure.

We then meet another inbred cannibal, this one named Three Toes. She's the daughter(or son, it's hard to tell with all the weird makeup in these movies, so I'm just going to sticvk with "she) of Three Finger. Okay, I'm telling you right now: if there's a mutant named Three Balls in this thing, the movie ends right there. Three Toes tries to set one of Dad's booby traps, and nearly gets killed in the process. Lucky for her, he shows up, and gives her a hand. They limp away together, making the worst Bring Your Daughter to Work Day in the history of humankind.

Everyone at the sheriff's station shuffles back onto the bus, and Nate promises to call him when they get through the countryside safely. On a remote stretch of road, the bus encounters a pickup truck that seems determined to chase them down. As the truck turns off its headlights, Nate tells Walter to keep driving and call in that they have an emergency. Nate checks his cell phone, but there's no signal.

The truck starts ramming them, then gets in front of the prison bus. A lengthy rope of barbed wire gets dropped under the front wheels of the bus, and the vehicle goes off the road, plummeting down a steep hill. Three Finger pulls over to admire his handiwork, as the group in the upside-down bus try to get their bearings.

As the bus starts to catch fire Nate comes to the rescue, and moves everyone to the rear doors. Chavez takes the opportunity to get the gun from Nate's hand by having his skinhead partner create a distraction, then demands that Nate hand over the keys to their shackles. Nate sheepishly tells him that the keys were dropped in the bus.

At that point, one of the other guards(the one who was a Fed, maybe?) gets the drop on Chavez. Right after he tells the convict to drop the gun, he gets a hunting knife deep in the side of his neck, courtesy of Three Finger. The skinhead assumes it was the thugs who were going to break them out, but as arrows go whizzing by their heads, the group realizes that it's no rescue or prison break. In typical movie fashion, these guys who were all ready to kill each other 10 minutes ago decide to work together to survive.

Nate is forced at gunpoint to return to the burning bus for the keys. He not only brings back a set of keys, but also Walter, who was pinned down by debris. They limp away from the bus just seconds before it explodes about 37 times in a row. Chavez takes the keys, and the group starts off into the dark forest.

They stop in a clearing, and Chavez tries to use the keys to remove his leg irons. When they don't work, Nate reveals that there are 3 sets of keys--one for the cage door, one for the wrists, and one for the legs. Whoops. Instead of killing him, Chavez offers Nate a deal: if he can lead them safely through the area he supposedly grew up in, he gets to live. Nate agrees, and tells them that he can take them to an old ranger watchtower.

As the groups hikes through the woods, a figure leaps from the shadows and attacks Nate. It's not one of the cannibals, it's Alex, the chick who survived the rampage in the opening sequence. She tells them what happened to her friends, but none of them believe her at first. After she describes Three Finger and her ordeal though, Nate tries to keep Alex calm. When she mentions the rafts, Chavez revises the plan and decides to use her rafts as a way to escape.

With Alex now in the lead, they head through the forest once more. When they find an overturned armored car in the woods, the plan gets revised yet again. They get the vehicle open, and find it filled with cash. Oh, and Nate finds another gun, which he conceals in his clothes, then gives to Walter.

Chavez forces everyone to carry 2 bags each, even after they point out that Walter is too injured to do it. Walter fakes falling over, then yanks out the old pistol, only to discover that it's a dud. Chavez shoots him in the head, then forces the group to continue on their journey. As they barely get going again, Three Toes jumps up from beneath a pile of leaves and tries to attack the group. As she tries to hack the skinhead to death, Chavez shoots her. Then, to scare off Three Finger, they mutilate her with a knife.

They find the rafts, then realize that each one can only hold 2 people. Chavez shoots at the chain shackling the fake con's legs together, then gets them all marching again. Three Finger, meanwhile finds the head of his child on a spike and goes insane with grief and anger. Oh, and Nate destroys one of the rafts, to ensure that they have to remain on foot.

The sheriff gets a call from his deputy, and she tells him that she wants to go take a look in the woods for their campsite. He agrees, and informs her that he's going out as well, since Nate never called him. Well, I'm sure they'll both be fine by the time the credits roll...

The cons find another set of keys dangling from a branch, and Chavez goes to grab them, Nate realizes that it's a trap and yanks Chavez off of his feet, only for the undercover marshal to get his own face chopped off by a swinging blade when he makes a grab for the keys. Three Finger runs away cackling, while bullets are wasted trying to kill him. Chavez chops the dead man's legs off, and then adds them to the list of things that need to be carried as the group soldiers on. When Floyd, the redneck, tries to rebel against Chavez, Chavez wins him over with a bigger share of the money and a promise of safety.

Nate, Alex and Brandon(the "nice" convict) strike up a conversation, and agree that they need to take down Chavez and the others if they want to survive. Up the road a bit, they see Three Fingers' abandoned truck, and Chavez bullies Crawford into trying to steal it for their escape. Crawford approaches the vehicle, then gets snared in a barbed-wire net as Three Finger hoists the trap up and drives away with his screaming victim. As Crawford is dragged along behind the truck, the wires and the road basically both kill him and remove most of his face.

With only five people left, the money becomes too heavy to carry. Nate, Brandon and Alex all stop to rest, and both Chavez and Floyd threaten them. Chavez nearly wastes Floyd, and the group trudges on yet again. Nate tells Alex that he can ambush Chavez from inside the observation tower, which suddenly makes a bell go off in my head....is that the tower from the first film? The one that was burnt down and destroyed by Eliza Dushku? Because if it's that very same tower, Nate is royally screwed. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a feeling I'm not.

The cute deputy, Ally, stops her car and hears Three Finger cackling somewhere near her location. At the same time, Floyd tries to kill Alex, leading to a scuffle between him and Nate, then Floyd and Chavez. Nate and Alex run away in the confusion.

The sheriff finds the bus, and calls it in on his radio. He examines the vehicle, then reports that he hasn't found anyone on board. DUH. This movie seems to wallow in repetition. I'll bet you a dollar that the group stops again soon, argues, then gets moving once more.

Getting back to Alex and Nate, they hear gunshots and start running. Chavez beats the crap out of Floyd, then forces Brandon to gather up as many bags of money as he can carry, and they leave Floyd to be discovered by any roaming cannibals in the vicinity. Mmmmmm, lunch!

Alex stops to catch her breath, and Nate tries to get her going again. At the same time, Brandon cuts a deal with Floyd for more money and help escaping with the folks Chavez is meeting up with that night. Both men agree to the new deal.

Floyd wakes up. He finds himself covered in blood, and limps his way through the woods. We then get a look at the lair of Three Fingers, which looks like it should be owned and operated by "Sanford & Son". As the mutant gets back in his truck, we see the sheriff and his dog trudging around in the dark. The lawman uses a pair of night-vision binoculars, then complains that he's "getting too old for this shit." Wow, stealing a famous line from Lethal Weapon is a pretty ballsy move! I hope Danny Glover never sees this thing.

As Nate and Alex resume the hike, Brandon and Chavez hear them and plan an ambush. Wait, wasn't Brandon a decent guy a few scenes ago? What happened, man? When Chavez prepares to kill the girl, Nate blurts out that the watchtower is over the next hill. They all start walking AGAIN, only to confirm my earlier suspicions...it WAS the same tower from the first movie! Ha!

Chavez puts a gun to Nate's head, but Leon the wonder dog attacks him. The sheriff has Nate grab the weapons off of both Brandon and Chavez, then they all get going again. Alex tells the sheriff about their ordeal, just seconds before Three Finger drops a spear from a tree into the sheriff's gaping mouth, as he looks up into the tree's branches. They try shooting the cannibal, but miss.

Floyd finds the money that was stashed away by Chavez and makes off with it. While he dreams of being wealthy, a team of U.S. Marshals plan to invade the forest, to find all of the folks who were supposed to be on the bus. Oh, and Chavez finds the money gone and goes nutzoid.

Floyd is making his way through the water, by way of several boulders. when he slips, he breaks a leg, and the others hear him screaming. After Chavez leaves to finish off Floyd, Nate tries to appeal to Brandon's decency, but Brandon refuses to let them escape. He claims that it's because he fears what Chavez will do to him when he finds out, but I'm thinking maybe I was giving Brandon way too much credit for decency.

When Chavez finds Floyd, the men trade insults. Then Floyd starts flinging money into the water, and Three Finger sets him on fire before Chavez can reach him. Along with the burly redneck, most of the money burns too. Well, I guess that means they can all play nice now, right?

Emerging from the woods, the remaining quartet find Three Finger honking the horn in his truck, which is just sitting there, parked near them. Chavez turns into Jennifer Love Hewitt, screaming, "What do you want??? Huh?" at the truck a few times. Three Finger responds by leaping up and firing an arrow at the convict, which lands in a tree next to Chavez.

Chavez grabs Alex by the arm, and shoves her toward the truck. He tells Three Finger that if he wants to have revenge, he can kill her. Chavez threatens to shoot Alex, who takes off running, only to be met by Three Finger. The psycho grabs her, then flings a Molotov cocktail at the others, to keep them from following him. Nate argues with Chavez about rescuing Alex, then Chavez prepares to shoot Nate. Luckily, Brandon hits Chavez with the butt of his gun, knocking him out. He apologizes to Nate for joining Chavez, then gives him the other man's gun. They part ways, Brandon attempting to reach a town, and Nate trying to rescue Alex.

In the truck, Alex is screaming like a banshee. At his home, Three Finger drags her out of the truck by the hair, and she cuts his hand. As Alex crawls away, the cannibal tackles her to the ground, throws her knife away, then licks her face. As she continues to scream for Nate, Three Finger drags her into the house.

Nate hears something move in his direction in the woods, but it's only Leon the police dog. Nate gives the dog something with Alex' scent on it, and off they go to track her down! Wait, what's that Leon? Timmy's stuck in a well again? Well screw him, that's a different movie!

Alex finds herself on her stomach, caught up in barbed wire. She tries to look around, and sees the deputy stripped naked, also wrapped in razor-sharp wire. As Alex watches, the deputy dies from her wounds, then Three Finger comes in to examine them both.

Before he can do anything to Alex, a helicopter arrives, bringing in the Feds! Brandon sees the helicopter as well, and hides behind a tree as the searchlight sweeps the ground. Chavez attacks him from behind, knocks him out, then chastises him for not being a cold-hearted killer. Nate also sees the helicopter, and tries to get it to land, but it moves in another direction.

Chavez and Three Finger spot each other on opposite ends of a clearing and have a face-off. Chavez attacks first, shooting the mutant in the shoulder, but then running out of bullets. He throws the gun, and Three Finger starts his counter-attack. He alternates between a hatchet and a scythe, while Chavez dodges blows and uses his fists. When Chavez gets the cannibal on the ground, he tries to pummel him into submission, but Three Finger plants his hook into the other man's shoulder.

Chavez rips the hook out himself, and gets the hatchet. As he taunts the inbred cannibal, Chavez manages to strike him in the side of the head. Before he can finish Three Finger off, the cannibal snatches up the scythe again, and rakes it over the escaped con's wrist.

Meanwhile, Brandon slowly gets back on his feet and staggers off into the woods again. Chavez and Three Finger both sit up, grunting, moaning, and both badly hurt. Three Finger drives the hook into Chavez' gut, with enough force to make him fall down again. Then Chavez is stabbed in the back and dragged to a tree, where Three Finger uses the hook to suspend him in the air. As Chavez struggles to keep breathing, Three Finger uses the hatchet to remove his skull cap, Hannibal Lecter-style. Chavez dies as the cannibal removes a large chunk of his brain and eats it.

Nate follows Leon to the cabin in the woods, and finds the house decorated with most of the supporting casts' limbs, torsoes, and heads. He eventually discovers the room where Alex and the dead deputy were being held, and tries to untie Alex as fast as he can without hurting her more than she already is. When Alex is finally able to stand up, Nate helps her out of the room.

Three Finger waits for them in the next room, hiding behind the door and slamming it shut once they're inside. As the cannibal and Nate brawl, Alex picks up a nearby knife and plants it up to the handle in Three Fingers' right shoulder. Three Finger removes it, then flings the girl across the room like a discarded towel. He picks up an axe and decides to finish off Nate.

Before anything bad happens to Nate, Leon leaps at Three Finger, snarling and biting. The inbred mutant kills the dog, just as Alex wakes up. She grabs a large, thick club and impales him with it, which effectively pins him to the floor. Nate retrieves the shotgun, and they leave the house.

Outside, after Nate helps Alex into the killer's truck, they drive away. We get a brief glimpse of Brandon making his way through the forest, trying to avoid being captured by the search party. When we switch back to the truck again, Alex thanks Nate for coming back to rescue her, then Three Finger pops up in the back, and uses the towing chain to swing around, trying to break the windows and kill the survivors.

When that goes nowhere, the cannibal stands up against the rear window to brace himself, then hacks away at the roof to get to them. One strike hits Nate squarely in the shoulder, and Alex picks up the shotgun. She fires a round through the damaged roof, but misses by a mile. Three Finger climbs the roof of the truck, and tries to grab Nate through the window on his side, which causes Nate to go off the road and crash into a tree. Three Finger goes flying, and the couple hit the dashboard.

Nate recovers first. He realizes that his leg is pinned against the steering column, and a trail of fuel can be seen leaking onto the ground. As the truck catches on fire, a hand grabs Nate from outside, but it's only Brandon. Nate tells him to rescue Alex first, because she hasn't regained consciousness yet. While Brandon complies Nate continues to push at the steering wheel, but it still won't budge.

Brandon goes back to help Nate, then Three Finger pops up again. He raises his axe, which gets stuck in the hood. Nate finds the hook, and shoves it under the mutant's chin, then it emerges through his forehead. Nate throws him onto the truck's hood, then he and Brandon make sure that Alex is okay. As they make their way down the road, the truck explodes.

They stop a short distance away, and Nate gets Brandon to admit that he was innocent of the murder he supposedly had committed. Nate then does the young con a solid, and concocts a story about Brandon dying, so the authorities won't come looking for him. As Brandon resumes his escape, Nate and Alex sit in the middle of the road and wait for the rescue team to find them, which they do in the morning.

In the final scene, Nate goes back for what's left of the money, only to be shot with an arrow by Brandon, who has ditched his prison garb for J. Crew. Brandon reminds the dead Nate that he should never trust a convict, then starts grabbing money by the handful. Behind him, Three Finger watches, brandishing a blood-drenched spear. The screen fades to black, and Brandon screams. THE END.

Well, if the movie had ended with Nate and Alex being rescued, I would have been happier. I mean, come on...leave SOMEONE alive!!! This film made up for some of the bad effects of the previous entry, but it needed a LOT more cannibal mountain-folk, like the first film had. Still, I really felt that this one was a better sequel. I hear they're making a fourth one, but it sounds like an in-name-only entry, so we'll have to wait and see how that one turns out. I'll give Wrong Turn 3 a total of 3 and a half killer trees out of five.

And what have I learned from watching Wrong Turn 3?

-All convicts turn out to be dickheads if you treat them with respect and mercy.

-It takes more than bullets, knives AND fire to kill an adult cannibal, but a young one will die if you just look at it the wrong way. And decapitate it.

-If, on your last day of work, your boss asks you to take a bus trip, say NO!

Next week, I watch a slasher starring some young kid by the name of Brad Pitt, a movie called Cutting Class. Will it make the grade, or will I make it ride the short bus? Find out next week!

Late Fee

Sometimes I really do wonder why I chose the slasher genre to watch for this blog. I mean, I really do love most of the films, but there are a lot of duds to sift through as well. This one's most definitely a dud. It's called Late Fee, and I'd have to search pretty hard to find something cheesier. SPOILERS follow, but you're better off just never renting this dumb movie...

The movie begins with a couple, simply called "Boy" and "Girl" according to the end credits(and the IMDB), wanting to rent some scary movies for Halloween. The local video store is about to close, though, so they have to pick out their movies quick if they really want to rent scary ones. Oh, and the owner of the establishment is in a hurry to close for the night, because he's holding the world's lamest Halloween party after hours.

What follows is a commercial for the production company's videos. Seriously, if you bother to watch the trailers on the DVD, you'll see that most, if not all, of the movies mentioned by the costumed partygoers are videos by the same company. LAME. The script tries to redeem itself by name-dropping Fangoria, but by then it's too late to wipe off the cheapness of the whole thing.

Boy and Girl(who are both waaay past the point of being called a boy and a girl, given that they look like they're in their early 30's) get 2 movies, after being hassled by the proprietor over their choices. He makes them sign a contract(using blood-ink, no less...and did I mention that his Halloween costume is Satan?), promising that they'll get the movies back by midnight. Uh, at that point I'd be storming out of the weird shop and finding a Blockbuster or something. They apparently don't agree, because they sign the contract, and go home with their 2 dumb-sounding rentals in their dumb, grubby mitts.

When they get home, the couple find some kids at their front door, waiting for Halloween candy. Boy gets the front door unlocked, and is tripped by one of the brats when he tries to offer them a selection of treats. Boy grumbles with Girl about the kids, then they decide to watch one of their movies. The doorbell rings, and Boy gets up to answer it again. Exciting movie, huh?

When he returns, Boy is clutching his stomach. As Girl freaks out, Boy moves his hands, spilling candy all over the floor. Okay, why the heck did Netflix categorize this as a slasher film? So far, we've seen a guy hosting a party, 2 idiots renting movies, and kids trick-or-treating. Is this even a horror film???

Well, I'll give it until the 45-minute mark. If it isn't slasher-y by then, I may just give up and mail it back. Okay, so after spilling candy all over the floor, Boy and Girl start to watch the first movie, called Pick Up. It begins with a shot of a building, where a woman just sort of "fades in" in front of the place. She's somewhat attractive, in a Melanie Griffith-slightly-past-her-prime sort of way. We see her walking and walking, then more walking. When night falls, she lights a cigarette and waits by the side of the road. Oh, and bad porno music is playing the entire time.

She thumbs a ride from a guy who looks like Dagwood Bumstead, and gets into the car 3 times. No kidding, they show it 3 times. Padding the running time much? They then ride past the opening credits of "Chico and the Man", as several days pass. I'm not kidding about that, either: every time they show another shot of "the city", it's a different time of day. What, did the "director" get a camcorder for his birthday or something, and take it on a class field trip?

The driver and the blond have a tense conversation, and it's revealed that the guy "ordered" her as an escort, off of the Internet. The escort gives him directions to a seedy motel, and off they go! At the motel's entrance, a guy out of a David Lynch film directs them into a parking space in the most ridiculous way possible. After parking, the motel owner shows them to a room, with Shatnerian enthusiasm. Geez. The "client" grabs a briefcase from the trunk, then he and the hooker enter the motel room.

The room is very....red. Wasting no time, the hooker removes her jacket. The client sits on the edge of the bed, and the hooker steps into the bathroom to "freshen up", but not before throwing him her panties. The client gets comfy, putting his wallet in the nightstand, and removing his pants. Unknown to him(but not us....lucky us.), the motel proprietor puts a facade up around the motel, with a heavy chain on it to prevent the client from escaping.

The client then opens his briefcase, revealing numerous torture devices and sex toys. As he hides the case under the bed, the hooker emerges from the bathroom in a skimpy negligee. Then we see the motel clerk inform a caller that there are no more vacancies. Whatever. Just die already!

The hooker and her client sit on the bed together, then bicker like an old married couple. As the hooker tries to loosen the guy up a bit, the desk clerk watches them through a peephole. Then the hooker turns off the light, and still, nothing happens!

In the dark, they start screwing, and then the hooker reveals herself to be some kind of tentacled, clawed, she-demon. She pretty much tears apart and eats the guy during sex, opening up his chest, ripping his limbs apart--heck, she even tears off his penis. Ouch! The screen fades to black, as she laughs.

After the meal, there's the sound of someone singing, as the camera slowly pans over the client's bloody corpse, missing most of his bottom half. The clerk shows up at the door the next morning, and they both watch as a couple of guys drive up to ask for directions. They refuse the offer of a room, but the Hookie Monster offers the men directions, in return for a lift.

Now alone, the motel clerk hauls the body away to a field near the highway, where we see several other bodies falling out of trash bags. THE END...of that story, at least. Boy and Girl discuss the film's merits(HA!Good one, movie!), Then Boy orders a pizza, while Girl answers the door again. No one was there, so they start the next film. Oh, and someone's watching them from outside. Oh well, at least someone finally died. I guess that means I better keep watching...

The next video they watch, Damnation, is about a woman who looks like Liv Tyler, driving on a long stretch of road. She and her husband are having a birthday party for their kid, and she's on the way to pick up a cake.

A female cop has different ideas. She pulls the woman over, gets her license and registration, then walks back to the squad car, scratching her ass along the way. Nice. When the cop returns, she demands that the driver gets out of the car, then arrests her. As the worried mother watches the cop destroy the cake and presents she had in the backseat, a black van pulls up, and a guy emerges to drive her car away. The woman blacks out, and I secretly get jealous. Why can't I black out, too?

When she wakes up, the motorist is being hosed down by the crazy cop, who then drags her down a corridor for her "trial". The judge, named Brutowsky, makes some crazy comments about air conditioning, then demands that she enter a plea. When she starts demanding to know why she was taken, Brutowsky tells her that arguing implies her automatic guilt.

He then reconsiders, and tells her that he will allow her to defend herself by reading a "book of law" on a nearby table. The book is filled with satanic imagery and covered in blood, which horrifies the young woman. Brutowsky finds her guilty, then tells her that the specifics of her death sentence will be determined by the "Wheel of Fate". The cop forces her to the ground, and makes her to wear a prison shirt.

The woman wakes up in a cell, and meets another girl being held captive. We find out that the main character's name is Justine. Her cellmate shows her a tattoo on her shoulder, a symbol that somehow tells them what she's guilty of.

Before they explain any of this nonsense, the dykey cop returns to intimidate Justine. Before THIS dumb exchange develops into anything useful(or, you know, INTERESTING), someone else arrives to chew the scenery! I sincerely hope that whatever Drama class threw this pile of steaming crap together got an F for their efforts.

The new character is the "Warden", who has the lesbo cop string up both women and fondle them, to, uh, "look for contraband". Then the Warden watches as they shower together. Back in his "office", he lets the cop decide Justine's sentence. She spins the wheel, and they grin at each other when it stops.

The next day, Justine hears another woman screaming, and is told by her new friend that it's another prisoner who happens to be a cannibal. Sure, why not? The cop arrives to bring the cellmate to see a doctor, and she struggles the entire way. In the doctor's "lab", he straps the woman to a table, and tells her that he's going to experiment on her with a "new form of birth control". The doctor then goes into the next chamber, to watch from a safe distance, and turns some kind of pentagram dial. A secret door panel opens, and some kind of feral beast-woman crawls into the room. I'm guessing that she's the aforementioned cannibal.

The inmate was pregnant, and cannibal woman pulls the baby out of her by force. She crawls back into her hole to eat the dead baby, and the now-not-pregnant girl passes out. When she wakes up again, she's back in the cell with Justine, still bleeding from her injury. Another girl is set up for torture by the doctor, but we don't see what happens to her.

The cop arrives again, and straps some kind of explosive tracking device to Justine's ankle. She drags the woman to a man outside, waiting by his car. He looks like Leisure Suit Larry. In the car, Justine pleads for her life, but the man tells her to wait until they're a safe distance away before asking for his help. He promises her that he will rescue her. Yeah, sure he will. And I'm James Bond.

He drives her to a motel(Wait, are we watching the first story again???), then tells her to wait in the room and keep the lights off. 2 strange guys are watching them, but both Justine and her rescuer ignore them. One of the men even holds up a milk carton with what looks like Justine's face on it. Whatever. Then we see a scene back at the prison, where the cannibal woman crawls around a bit.

Justine sleeps in the bed, and wakes up to find the entire room wrapped in clear plastic. As Justine tries to figure out what's happening, the 2 guys who were staring at her earlier enter the room. They claim that they paid a lot of money for her, then the bracelet device starts beeping. It doesn't explode, though, it just shuts off after a few seconds...but not before sending a signal to the Warden and LezCop. Before they can decide what to do, the cannibal bursts in and kills them both.

Oh, and the word "LIBERTAS" flashes on the screen.

The 2 rapists tie Justine up and gag her. Her "hero" walks in, and it turns out that they're making a snuff film. As they start filming, a nut in a skull mask breaks down a door with a chainsaw. As he stands over Justine, the guy who drove her to the motel whips out a handgun and shoots the 2 rednecks. Then he and the guy in the mask start to fight, and the "director" snaps the killer's neck.

When Justine regains her senses, the driver is still filming, but she's in his car again. He tells her to smile, and she gets injected with something, then complies with his request. They ride away together, into a fake sunset. THE END

As Boy and Girl finish watching the video, the doorbell rings again. Boy gets up to answer it, while Girl chews on a fingernail. Exciting stuff. It's the pizza. Yay. As they sit down to eat, Girl realizes that it's just past midnight. Oops....

Girl starts to panic, and insists that they have to return the movies immediately. Boy scoffs at the suggestion, and then suddenly realizes that the pizza was delivered by the video store guy himself. They then discover that the pizza is topped with worms, nails, bugs, and other assorted junk. The doorbell rings again, and they both scream.

As they try to think of a way out of their predicament, there's something tapping the nearby window. Boy gets up to take a look, and sees nothing. A brick gets thrown through the window, and the attached note tells them that since Boy signed the contract, he will have to pay the penalty.

At that moment, the store owner walks into their living room, followed by all of the ridiculously unscary party members. As the Devil threatens Boy, Boy responds by swinging a baseball bat, and knocking him to the floor. The costumed intruders then start stealing the couple's DVD collection, grabbing movies by the armful. Uh, if these 2 idiots had five thousand movies to begin with, why didn't they just stay home?

The intruders remove the movies from their cases, and snap them in half. Then, as the Devil gets up again and laughs, they start stabbing Boy to death with the jagged shards they had just created. Both Boy and Girl are killed(I guess they lied about Boy paying the penalty himself, huh?), and the Devil takes photos of them dead on the couch. Oh, and the guy in the werewolf costume pees on everything. Very classy.

The last scene shows the crazy video store owner carrying a stack of movies into his store. As he places them on a shelf, the front of the DVD casing clearly shows Boy and Girl dead on the cover, and the film is called The Midnight DVD Massacre. A customer walks in, nearly rents something called Hollywood Crap, then picks up the snuff film instead.

The customer is revealed to be a little boy. He nervously tells the store owner that he's 18, and the guy warns him about the Late Fee policy. As the boy leaves the store, the owner stares into the camera and laughs. THE END...no, wait, there's a brief scene after the credits. The video store guy is still laughing and laughing into the camera, then just abruptly stops and looks bored. I know how he feels...

Man, what a piece of crap this was. I don't know how Netflix thought this was a slasher flick, but it's barely even a movie! The acting was lousy, the quality of the production was z-grade, the plot was complete nonsense---Hell, our lead characters didn't even have NAMES! And don't get me started on the way the producers plugged their other films! This was horrible, and I vow to never watch another "Fever Dreams/Shriek Show" production as long as I still retain (most of) my marbles. 1/2 a killer tree for gratuitous nudity, and that's being pretty damn charitable.

And what did this steaming pile leave me with?

-Well, anyone can make a movie, so, "Yay, independent films," I guess.

-When Netflix tells you that you're watching a slasher flick, they're not always telling you the truth...

-Some Fever Dreams can be nightmares.

Which reminds me, my next film coming in is Wrong Turn 3. I can almost guarantee, it won't be nearly as awful as Late Fee was. If it is, I'll start watching and reviewing movies for kids. But it won't be.