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ektalon
Reviews
Hallow's End (2003)
Ummmm . . . . it's shot well?
*WARNING. THERE MIGHT BE SPOILERS AHEAD, IF YOU CARE.*
Okay, the basic premise of this homegrown Texas film is: College kids + spookhouse + evil magic book = scary stuff. In practice, it equals a lot of time looking at the time to see how much longer this movie is going to drag on. A bunch of frat boys, along with assorted girlfriends & volunteers, is setting up a charity haunted house. The project is being presided over by a thoroughly repellent character, whose main purpose seems to be verbally & physically assaulting as many cast members as possible. I had a hard time believing that anyone would even attempt to work with this person in any capacity: he's nothing but rude and abusive to everyone, including his girlfriend and his buddy. Regardless, the kids are visited by local character & annual pumpkin-carving champion "Pumpkin Jack", an elderly coot who is described as the "Santa Claus of Halloween", and who drops off a load of props for the house, including an ominous book that figured prominently in the irritatingly strobe-flashed prologue(where a gaggle of robed cultists get turned into stir-fry). Needless to say, some damn fool starts messing with the book, and eventually most of the costumed monsters turn into real ones, and the remaining few normal folk have to try and survive. There's some good stuff in this film, but not much: everything is shot well, and the makeup effects are decent. On the other hand, the performers either underact, or overact drastically; much of the plot makes little sense outside of a "this happens so that can happen" series; there is hardly any musical score to speak of, just snatches of songs throughout the film; and the movie takes an hour to actually get anywhere. That last problem is the most telling: two-thirds of the 90 minute running time is used to repeatedly set up the characters. Tom is a nice guy dating Heidi the control freak, but he used to date Jill, who is now dating Dan the jerk, but she's started a relationship Kira the girl who wears too many shawls/capes. Dan is a really big jerk, Gary likes to play jokes, and Steve & Lily like to have a lot of sex. Stuff that could have easily been dealt with in 20 minutes or so drags on and on, to the point where the lesbian "sex" scene(calm down, it's pretty tame) left me looking for the fast forward button. That leaves us with half an hour of lo-calorie scares, a klunky ending and a deep-seated dislike of ol' Pumpkin Jack, who I blame for the whole mess. Unless you can get this on some sort of deep-discount rental(and really have seen everything else in the store), put it back on the shelf and keep looking.
Legion of the Dead (2001)
Total, utter crap
To save people just scanning the first few lines of a review, THIS IS A TERRIBLE MOVIE!! That said, my reasons for it are numerous: the actors either can't act, or have a small grain of talent, which they use to over-act to embarrassing proportions. The plot, such as it is, seems to be the combination of a dozen or so ideas the writer/director mashed together into a senseless heap. Characters appear and disappear at random, and the film is loaded with pointless, confusing cutaways. Dialogue is at best painful, and a number of times comes off as a blatant ripoff of Tarantino's already irritating discussions about nothing (what was with Luke's fascination with mumu's and peepee's? The pair of door-to-door killer's endless discussion of their suits? Who knows?) The makeup effects are average, and the CGI effects (what there are) fall well below average. Being an editor myself, I can confidently say the editing was dismal. And what can I say about the ending? It was all a dream/hallucination/alternate dimension? The best that can be said is that the shots were in focus, and lit well. For the sake of the brain cells you will lose watching this, not to mention the precious hour and a half of your life you will lose, leave this stinkbomb on the shelf of your local video store until they decide to send it off to the video limbo it so richly deserves.