Reviews

3 Reviews
Sort by:
Filter by Rating:
Unhinged (1982)
3/10
This one should have stayed lost in the 80's!
26 January 2009
I bought Unhinged because I got suckered by the gory picture on the cover. If you want to see all the good parts of the movie just look on the back of the box. All the kills are shown and I can honestly tell you that they look much better in the still frames than they do in the movie.

Having said that, let's look at the plot. A group of college girls driving to a rock concert (by way of the deep, dark woods in one of the longest driving sequences ever captured on celluloid) slide off the road. No visible damage is done to the car but apparently it was enough to put one of the characters in a comatose state for the rest of the film (or perhaps she read the script and was already in a coma before filming began).

The two remaining girls wake up in a big, isolated house. The house, by the way, is fabulous and manages more drama just by its presence than any of the actors in the film. For some reason, though, this house has no roads going to it. The only way you can get to the main road is by hiking five miles through the woods. The girls spend the rest of Unhinged sitting around listening to weird conversations between an old rich bitch (who looks like George Washington in drag) and her equally homely, sexually repressed daughter. The girls apparently were in no hurry to get back from that concert anyway being that they packed more clothes than the cast of Gilligan's Island for that three hour tour.

By the time we, the viewers, get to the kill scenes, we no longer care. We wish that someone would kill us just to end our suffering . Unhinged finally wraps up with a quite shocking ending that deserved to be in a much better film. It's almost as though the ending, the one good idea in the film, was written first and then the writers tried to make a movie leading up to it.

Unhinged is ultimately a boring film with bad acting, inept directing, and a plot with more holes than a leper in a porno film (sorry. I'm not sure where that came from). You will get an idea of how bad this movie is during the opening credits when, for some reason that is never explained, the screen goes black for about two minutes while the characters talk about nothing worth remembering. Don't waste your time. You'll just feel Unhinged and want your time and money back.
4 out of 5 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
2/10
Feels like five hours
17 November 2008
As horror fans we all know that blind rentals are a crap-shoot. Sometimes we find a real gem, but many times we find that the film we've just spent our hard earned money on is nothing more than a putrid steamer made worse by the completely undeserved rave reviews and film fest awards listed on the box. Such is the case with Five Across the Eyes ( a title I'm sure is a double entendre referring to both the films budget and the compulsion anyone watching it might have to using all five fingers to stab their eyes out ).

The story, or, at least what the *ahem* writers think passes for one, centers on a group of teen girls who unwisely decide to go on a backwoods joyride late at night after leaving a football game and run afoul of a crazy woman who plays cat and mouse with them as punishment for what she thinks the girls found in her car after a fender-bender in a gas station parking lot.

In fairness, it's an interesting idea. Some of the best horrors have very simple story lines. It's in the execution of Five Across the Eyes that this idea falls flat. The film tries to be a cross between The Blair Witch Project with its shaky camera work and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in its bare-bones approach to the material but succeeds at being neither. What we get instead are redundant scenes of chase, torture, release; chase torture, release, in that order for 94 minutes with long interludes of bitching, moaning, and incoherent rambling acting as plenty of padding in-between chase sequences.

The look of the film is incredibly grainy and dark, which, in a better made film might have enhanced the tension and the realism. Here it's merely annoying. The characters are undeveloped and the viewer is hard-pressed to find anything to sympathize with them. One character stops to get a first-aid kit and tend to some scrapes on her face while gunshots heard in the background indicate her friends may be getting killed. Another girl mutters hilariously dumb lines like "Don't go out there, she'll get you, if she gets you she'll kill you and if she kill's you you're dead".

It was an accolade from Fangoria magazine and Dreadcentral.com listed on the box that compelled me to check this one out. Talk about a fake orgasm! Perhaps my expectations would have been met had this been in the comedy section. I'm all for low-budget Indie horror but this one takes the crap-cake. Give Five Across the Eyes (or FATE; get it?) a pass.

RazorFriendly gives FATE 1 slash out of five /
9 out of 14 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
Carver (2008 Video)
7/10
Unoriginal, yet unnerving
28 August 2008
In the wake of brutal films such as SAW and Hostel along with all the clones that have followed in the torture sub-genre, filmmakers are hard pressed to come up with something that tops them. Director Franklin Guerrero (The 8th Plague) has succeeded where many have failed. CARVER is a nasty little film that takes inspiration from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and throws in buckets of blood for good measure.

The cover art on the DVD box, featuring a head getting cut in half by a chain merely hints at the many gruesome acts the viewer will witness. These things alone do not a horror movie make. Many times scenes of violence and bloodshed in films only elicit yawns from the audience. That is where CARVER succeeds. The special effects in this film are amazing. One scene in particular looks so real and the idea behind it so disturbing that only the most jaded of viewers wouldn't watch it through closed fingers.

One of the gripes I've read that people had with this film is that it is made on the cheap and looks low-budget. I find that it is for this reason that Carver is so unsettling. One does not expect to find realistic looking kills in a low-budget direct-to-DVD movie. In an age when Hollywood churns out cookie-cutter remakes with hokey CGI special effects, it's refreshing to see an independent film with guts (literally) that puts them to shame.

As for the plot, it's nothing you haven't seen before i.e: People camping in the woods and being preyed upon by inbred, slobbering killers and dealing with the local, slack jawed, yokels. But, in fairness, it's a formula that works and fans of the genre will rejoice. The acting is fair to above average and the direction is confident.

RazorFriendly gives CARVER four out of five slashes.

////
1 out of 2 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

Recently Viewed