The Greenskeeper

When someone starts using the business end of a pair of hedge clippers on the more snobbish patrons of a posh country club, rumors fly the slice-n'-dice handiwork is the signature of The Greenskeeper, a serial killer long thought dead from an explosion years ago. Allen, whose mother owns the country club, begins having nightmare visions where he is haunted by The Greenskeeper. Allen begins to suspect he may have a connection to The Greenskeeper he never dared imagine. Meanwhile, the beautiful jet setters of the club decide to sneak in after hours for some skinny-dipping, partying, and sex-on-the-green. Unfortunately for the teens, The Greenskeeper decides to crash the party, and armed with golf equipment and landscaping tools, begins picking off Izods one by one. Joining forces with his new love interest Elena, Allen races to the club to try to save his friends. He and Elena must play a deadly game of cat and mouse to survive, because when you have a tee time with The Greenskeeper, it's par for the corpse!

Gore should be the main attraction in a low budget slasher film. Of course, it isn't. There was way too much focus on a lame plot than the potentially cool killings. They did manage to have a slit throat, a couple be-headings, an anal insertion golf cleaner, and a hedger through the stomach. The gore was pretty dry and incredibly lazily done. With every potential murder weapon on a golf course they could have done a lot better.

The acting actually wasn't too bad to begin with. It was supposed to be super cheesy, but went overboard towards the end with the lazy/awful lines. Some of the comedy was actually pretty funny and delivered how it was meant to be delivered. Allelon Ruggiero really wasn't too bad as the loser guy. The yuppies were all played obnoxiously well and made me laugh a few times. This truthfully wasn't the bad part of the movie.

It had the b-movie feel, but there really weren't too many mistakes. There were a few bad shots here and there, but nothing that ruined the movie. The lighting and audio was always properly done(sort of.) The fake lightning was completely terrible and happened every time the killer was on the courses. That was totally idiotic. The other bad technical aspect was the music...They felt it was necessary to constantly have cheesy mystery or pop music playing throughout the movie. It really didn't have to be this bad!

Final Thoughts: This totally could have been a really fun movie with the exact same cast and crew members and script even. Cheesy music, bad (and dry)gore, lame effects, and too much plot did this movie in. I really wanted to enjoy it, but it just didn't deliver the goods. Too bad the horror movie they were watching on TV (the milkman) looked more like the movie this should have been.

I FINALLY got to see this movie. I was looking forward to it but was thoroughly disappointed. The plot, if any was there, was lame and tired at best. The acting was below sub-par (for the corpse). The directing was too choppy with jagged scene shifts and the lighting and audio need help. I would not recommend this double-bogey movie to anyone.

Golf is one of the worst of all possible sports, pointlessly wasteful of natural resources and harmful to the environment; country clubs, as a playground for the rich and powerful, deserve to be abolished outright. Slashers are one of the worst of all possible movie genres, not exactly being known for cleverness. For that matter the early 2000s weren't exactly a great time for cinema, as computer-generated imagery of the era was just advanced enough that everyone and their cousin wanted to make use of it, but not nearly good enough to have aged well thereafter; conceptions of music too often involved very tiresome, sterile pop and radio-friendly rock; and humor was defined by a lot of 'American pie'-like raunchiness and 'Dude, where's my car?' stoner bits, both of which are rather dull and have very limited appeal. Now put all these elements together into one supposed "horror-comedy,' and we have 2002's 'The greenskeeper.' I didn't have high expectations when I sat to watch, but for better and for worse I'll sit for almost anything. The opening scene seems kind of promising, and the film quickly gives us a large roster of awful, obnoxious, privileged white characters that we'll be glad to see sent off to the sand trap of eternity - but otherwise, in all earnestness, this swiftly grows tiresome.

Given that the whole bent here is far less than serious, I suppose it's only fair to wonder if it's not on purpose that everything is so over the top and kitschy, and so pointedly betrays the falseness of the presentation. Are filmmakers Kevin Greene, Adam Johnson, Tripp Norton, and Alex Wier making fun of all these tropes and ideas, or using them for lack of any other creativity, substance, or means? It's a fair question, I think, as our attention is caught in the wrong way by the dialogue, characters, scene writing, and narrative; the attempted humor, the tawdrily boorish and obnoxious sensibilities about sexuality and anatomy; the direction, too much of the acting, the rather bare-faced production values, and cinematography and editing that are only ever unremarkable or outrageous with no middle ground; plain art direction, overbearing music, and aspects of homophobia, racism, and classism. Then again, maybe it's not even a question that really matters, for whether all this is employed in jest or as a sincere expression of film-making, it's just not any fun. In one fashion or another some small moments come off better than others, but I definitely didn't laugh once in eighty-two minutes. I've seen the bottom of the barrel, and this isn't it, but there simply isn't any actual entertainment to be had here.

I guess the practical effects are well done, including blood and gore. The costume design, hair, and makeup are nice, such as they are. The root story in and of itself is decent, if truly nothing special. Despite the worst efforts of all involved, Melissa Ponzio turns in a performance that is fairly admirable. But is there anything else here that's baseline commendable? Is there anything about this that is meaningfully enjoyable? I don't think there is. If you're desperate for slasher fare, juvenile humor circa 2000, nudity, or "horror-comedy," then I guess you'll find what you're looking for. Yet what possible other reason would anyone have to watch this, especially since we could be watching literally anything else instead? What's really terrible is that the only reason I found this in the first place was because the 2018 'Ducktales' episode "The missing links of Moorshire!" was so outstanding that I found myself wondering about other horror or fantasy involving golf; finding this, in turn, feels like the classic notion of a genie granting a wish, but with awful, ironic consequences. There are much worse things one could watch, sure, but for as bland and pretty much outright boring as 'The greenskeeper' is, the distinction doesn't count for much. Check it out if you like, but I don't know why you would.

Release date is September 9, 2003.

1) If you enjoyed movies like "Don't go in the House," or "Don't go in the Basement," then you must like low budget horror films that are so campy they are funny. The Greenskeeper is one of those movies.

2) If you laughed during Final Destination 2 because people were killed off in a funny manner then you'll also laugh at the way adults (not teens) are killed off in The Greenskeeper.

3) If seeing a couple killed while they are having sex bothers you than this is not the movie for you. Although the way he kills them is so gross and so funny that you will be laughing and gaging at the same time.

The point of this movie is not to scare you but to make you laugh.

You laugh not because of any witty banter but because the banter is so bad that you groan.

You laugh because the budget for special effects was so low that the killings looked really fake but that's the beauty of seeing these types of films. In fact at the end of the movie when one of the special effects gets a little carried away the actors broke character and started laughing but the producers kept this shot anyway. The producers understood they were not making some great piece of art to scare you off of a golf course.

If you are a John Rocker fan and plan on buying this movie because he's in it let me warn you ahead of time you'll only get to see John's face for maybe a total of 2 minutes during the film. About half of his screen time is spent in make-up like a serious burn victim (The rest of the time he looks very cute). When the killer goes on his rampage he's in a beekeepers bonnet so you can't see his face. The producers said they had asked John (not his character) to help out by throwing tennis balls off camera onto the tennis court when the tennis ball machine broke down.

I do plan on buying this movie because I love horror movies that can make me laugh and gag at the same time.

The Greenskeeper is an emotionally shattering experience that will undeniably open your eyes to what cinema can TRULY be. It isn't so much the character's usage of booze or crack, but rather, the emotion that the Greenskeeper conveys that truly sets him apart from your standard slasher villain. The subtle, nuanced performance by John Rocker will captivate the viewer and draw you into the mind of a disturbed, misunderstood soul. When the film is finally released to the general public, do not be surprised if you hear Oscar buzz soon building, not only for Rocker, but for the rest of the exceptional cast as well. In particular, the character of Otis Washington is played marvelously by Thomas Merdis, although it fails to match his prior performance in My Cousin Vinny as The Man in Town Square, which I am positive everyone remembers. All in all this film can only be described as brilliant, although if I were to TRULY and ACCURATELY sing it's praises, I would be sitting here typing all night... Don't miss this mindblowing combination of sex, drugs, and Rocker.