Every once in a while a horror movie comes along with an interesting new spin or a brand new premise. The idea is to create something new rather than a rehash of any of the top ten to twelve horror movie archetypes out there. "Crazy Eights" has a good idea, but it doesn't really go anywhere with it. Part of the problem is the glaring holes in the plot and the confusing script. The movie starts out like "Without A Paddle" as six friends meet at the funeral of a classmate and are drawn into a scavenger hunt they takes them into a remake of "House On Haunted Hill." After a variety of strange encounters in their lives, the six are drawn to a barn where they left a time capsule as kids and find a skeleton in the trunk, which may or may not be linked to their pasts. They struggle too briefly with doing the right thing and way too quickly try to shrug it off if but to get very quickly lost on the local dirt roads and end up at an old deserted hospital in the ghost town of Entonsburg within an unidentified Southern state. This is where things start getting confusing. Instead of making efforts to get on their way, they explore the hospital and start getting picked off by an unseen killer in a dress. Thankfully, the gore is done off-camera with the disturbing images revealed only in brief flickering images. It's difficult to feel sympathetic to the characters unless you're a fan of the actors. The cast includes George Newbern, Traci Lords, Gabrielle Anwar and a number of actors with whom I'm unfamiliar. The movie never at any moment makes an effort to clear up or resolve any questions, instead pushing forward and killing off its cast like, as Jeff Goldblum once put it, the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride coming to life and killing the tourists. In fact, the movie can't choose if it's a haunted house movie or a slasher/gore movie. Somewhere in this detritus of scenes and images, the movie establishes the six friends once lived in the old hospital with their deceased friend and one other girl ("The Crazy Eight") where they were victims of psychological experiments, but they escaped after hiding the young girl and promising to return. (Remind you of "I Know What You Did Last Summer?") This suggests their dead friend is the one getting revenge for forgetting about her in the trunk all those years ago, but at no point does anyone realize, "Hey, this the old hospital where we were abandoned by our parents to be terrorized by those evil doctors?" How could they possibly block something like that out, and why does the girl's ghost look adult and zombified? Why do they stay in the building when all they were doing was trying to get directions? Why does the ghost kill them at all when she could just scare the crap out of them over and over and over? Like I said, the movie can't decide what it is. It's a promising premise that gets convoluted and confusing without being scary or even making sense, and in my world, that's just a crying waste of what could have been a decent haunted house movie.
Review of Crazy Eights
