Cheesetastic Part 2
Welcome back to Cheesetastic. This is not going to be as good a review as last time, the reason being is that I actually missed the first part of this movie. I came into it about 20 minutes in, I think, so I probably missed some important setup stuff. In fact, I know I did. More on that later.
So without further ado, welcome to the Cheesetastic review of... Bloody Murder 2! Woo hoo!
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I can't remember which channel this one was on, but I do know they showed it practically every night for like a week. I kept seeing it on the guide and wanted to watch it, because I love the slasher genre. The cheesier, the better. So one night I finally caught most of it, and had some mixed feelings.
The plot involves a group of teenagers at a summer camp that is closing at the end of the season. Apparently the main character, Tracy, came there to work even though her brother was killed at that same camp 5 years earlier by a psycho named Trevor Moorehouse. Yeah. "Trevor Moorehouse". Not exactly the scariest name I have ever heard. In fact, that has to be about the lamest name for the killer in the history of horror. Think about that. You got Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, etc., then "Trevor Moorehouse"? That sounds like someone who does a lot of shopping at the Gap and spends his weekends wearing deck shoes. Doesn't exactly strike terror into the hearts of the viewers.
Anyway, back to the Tracy character. What I don't get is why someone would come to work at the camp where her brother got murdered, then wonder why she is having nightmares about it. I mean, come on. Even for a slasher flick, that's pretty stupid. Oh well, "Citizen Kane" this ain't. But no one really expected it to be, did they?
There isn't much more than that, plot wise, but the filmmakers try to add suspense with a super cheesy looking computer-video-detective-red-herring sequence. Is Tracy's boyfriend the killer? Is he just acting shady? Did someone edit the videotape to make it look like he is the killer? Why in the hell would a guy leave his (running) videocamera in a tree pointed at the cabin door in the first place? All fairly pointless questions, really. But it padded the running time some, so I guess they needed to be in there.
Also, the photography in this movie sucked. It looked like it was shot on a lower end digital video camera in a lot of the scenes, with the picture being really grainy and blurry. Also, whoever lit this film was obviously drinking or something. This was one of the darkest, hardest to see movies I have ever had the chance to witness. I think they were going for a moody, atmospheric look, or maybe even a more natural look than a lot of movies, but Christ, I could barely tell what the hell was going on in some of the scenes.
As for the acting, it was so-so, to be expected in a killer-in-the-woods-with-a-goofy-mask flick. Katy Woodruff, who plays Tracy, is oddly enough the worst actress in the movie. Odd because she gets the lead over two other girls, at least one of which (Tiffany Shepis) acted circles around her. The guys are pretty uniformly bad, especially the camp owner guy, who looked the whole time like he had to take a bathroom break or something. I could just imagine the director saying to him, "Now are you sure you don't have to go? You are sure? Because once we start shooting, I'm not gonna stop. Ok? You sure?"
There was a pretty good amount of the good old blood-and-boobs standard in these movies. More of the former than the latter. The arrow through the neck scene was pretty good, but they kept going and going and going with it. I wanted to shout at the screen "Ok, I get it! The guy got shot in the damn neck with a damn arrow. What am I, blind?" There was the chainsaw scene, the plain old knife scene, and someone's head got smashed with a rock. That was pretty nifty. But overall the kill scenes were fairly flat, not especially creative. Not much nudity, relatively speaking. Only one of the girls had a nude or sex scene, but she did have two of them. One shower scene and a back-to-nature outdoor shag that must have been colder than hell. I could see the actors' breath the whole time, meaning it had to be down around what, 45 degrees or lower? Youch.
The climax of the flick I just didn't get. The sheriff turns out to be either the killer or the mastermind, it's never completely clear. At least to me. I think he was the mastermind, because Trevor (Ha! Sorry, that gets me every time. A killer named Trevor.) does actually kill some people, maybe not all, but the majority. But then, after killing all these people, he shows up with the sheriff, who turns out to be his dad (ummm, ok...). Turns out dad wants to make sure the camp closes for good or something. So the evil plan is coming to fruition, right? Wrong. Dad and Jr. Psycho Boy have the two surviving girls trapped, right where they want them. Then, for no reason whatsoever, at the last second Trevor turns and kills his dad with a chainsaw, looks at the chicks for a second, and walks away. What the...?
Whatever, on to The List...
- I kept rooting for the main character Tracy to get killed. My ex's name is Tracy, and I could only wish she was caught out in the woods with a chainsaw-wielding nutcase.
- The scene where the character Angela (the one who got naked) is all upset because she thinks her fling at the camp took off without saying goodbye or anything was a masterpiece of weird logic. The guy is dead, but Trevor or dad or someone forged a note from him saying he just up and left. So Angela is all pissed and sad, crying and saying stuff like "I knew this was just a summer thing, but that was a shitty thing to do, blah blah blah". And what is her solution? To wait as long as maybe 9 seconds and then ask the boyfriend of one of the other camp counselors to go have sex with her. Ha!
- The black guy in this movie was named Elvis. Kind of a strange touch. You don't see many black guys named Elvis.
- Speaking of the black guy, there was this one really stupid scene where he and the third (completely superfluous) female character have the "black guys always get killed first in horror movies" conversation. First of all, that conversation has been had in so many horror movies that at this point it is beyond tired. For another thing, this scene where they had the conversation was horrible. It was done in all one take, with the camera moving around. That in itself isn't so bad, but the cameraman kept moving between the sun and the actors, so about every 5 seconds we are treated to 'camera shadow', a sure sign of a director who doesn't pay attention. Not just once, but over and over again. Also, it was shot from a extreme low angle for some reason, which was really distracting.
- I had seen the cover box for this movie in Hollywood Video at one point, and it shows a guy in a hockey mask with a big meat hook in his hand. So it's a pretty safe bet that someone in this movie will be killed with a meat hook by a guy in a hockey mask, right? Wrong. No hockey mask, no meat hook. Trevor the Killer doesn't have a hockey mask, he has some generic thing that looks like a cross between the mask Michael Meyers wears and the one in the Scream movies. Weird.
- What the hell was with turning this movie into a Nancy Drew mystery toward the end? No one watches these to solve a mystery, they watch them to see people screwing and getting chopped to pieces. Hear me, directors, writers, et al.? Screwing and chopping, that's what your public wants, trust me.
- The credits at the end said "Shot on Fuji film", but if this wasn't shot on digital video I'll take back everything I said about Trevor being a scary name.
-----------------------
So what we have here is a pretty routine slasher flick, not much better or worse than the countless others out there. It was fun in spots, but I would have to say overall it lacked the sense of fun of some of the earlier entries in this genre. At the height of the slasher flick era in the 80's, there was (almost) always a sense of fun about these movies, like the filmmakers knew the movies weren't going to be that great, but they were having a ball making them. This one lacked that, and I believe suffered for it. Not as good (meaning cheesily enjoyable) as I hoped. 2 out of 5 cheese wheels. Kinda good times.
"And since I'm being fired anyway, you want to know what else grinds my gears? You, America. F%#k you." - FG
So without further ado, welcome to the Cheesetastic review of... Bloody Murder 2! Woo hoo!
----------------
I can't remember which channel this one was on, but I do know they showed it practically every night for like a week. I kept seeing it on the guide and wanted to watch it, because I love the slasher genre. The cheesier, the better. So one night I finally caught most of it, and had some mixed feelings.
The plot involves a group of teenagers at a summer camp that is closing at the end of the season. Apparently the main character, Tracy, came there to work even though her brother was killed at that same camp 5 years earlier by a psycho named Trevor Moorehouse. Yeah. "Trevor Moorehouse". Not exactly the scariest name I have ever heard. In fact, that has to be about the lamest name for the killer in the history of horror. Think about that. You got Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, etc., then "Trevor Moorehouse"? That sounds like someone who does a lot of shopping at the Gap and spends his weekends wearing deck shoes. Doesn't exactly strike terror into the hearts of the viewers.
Anyway, back to the Tracy character. What I don't get is why someone would come to work at the camp where her brother got murdered, then wonder why she is having nightmares about it. I mean, come on. Even for a slasher flick, that's pretty stupid. Oh well, "Citizen Kane" this ain't. But no one really expected it to be, did they?
There isn't much more than that, plot wise, but the filmmakers try to add suspense with a super cheesy looking computer-video-detective-red-herring sequence. Is Tracy's boyfriend the killer? Is he just acting shady? Did someone edit the videotape to make it look like he is the killer? Why in the hell would a guy leave his (running) videocamera in a tree pointed at the cabin door in the first place? All fairly pointless questions, really. But it padded the running time some, so I guess they needed to be in there.
Also, the photography in this movie sucked. It looked like it was shot on a lower end digital video camera in a lot of the scenes, with the picture being really grainy and blurry. Also, whoever lit this film was obviously drinking or something. This was one of the darkest, hardest to see movies I have ever had the chance to witness. I think they were going for a moody, atmospheric look, or maybe even a more natural look than a lot of movies, but Christ, I could barely tell what the hell was going on in some of the scenes.
As for the acting, it was so-so, to be expected in a killer-in-the-woods-with-a-goofy-mask flick. Katy Woodruff, who plays Tracy, is oddly enough the worst actress in the movie. Odd because she gets the lead over two other girls, at least one of which (Tiffany Shepis) acted circles around her. The guys are pretty uniformly bad, especially the camp owner guy, who looked the whole time like he had to take a bathroom break or something. I could just imagine the director saying to him, "Now are you sure you don't have to go? You are sure? Because once we start shooting, I'm not gonna stop. Ok? You sure?"
There was a pretty good amount of the good old blood-and-boobs standard in these movies. More of the former than the latter. The arrow through the neck scene was pretty good, but they kept going and going and going with it. I wanted to shout at the screen "Ok, I get it! The guy got shot in the damn neck with a damn arrow. What am I, blind?" There was the chainsaw scene, the plain old knife scene, and someone's head got smashed with a rock. That was pretty nifty. But overall the kill scenes were fairly flat, not especially creative. Not much nudity, relatively speaking. Only one of the girls had a nude or sex scene, but she did have two of them. One shower scene and a back-to-nature outdoor shag that must have been colder than hell. I could see the actors' breath the whole time, meaning it had to be down around what, 45 degrees or lower? Youch.
The climax of the flick I just didn't get. The sheriff turns out to be either the killer or the mastermind, it's never completely clear. At least to me. I think he was the mastermind, because Trevor (Ha! Sorry, that gets me every time. A killer named Trevor.) does actually kill some people, maybe not all, but the majority. But then, after killing all these people, he shows up with the sheriff, who turns out to be his dad (ummm, ok...). Turns out dad wants to make sure the camp closes for good or something. So the evil plan is coming to fruition, right? Wrong. Dad and Jr. Psycho Boy have the two surviving girls trapped, right where they want them. Then, for no reason whatsoever, at the last second Trevor turns and kills his dad with a chainsaw, looks at the chicks for a second, and walks away. What the...?
Whatever, on to The List...
- I kept rooting for the main character Tracy to get killed. My ex's name is Tracy, and I could only wish she was caught out in the woods with a chainsaw-wielding nutcase.
- The scene where the character Angela (the one who got naked) is all upset because she thinks her fling at the camp took off without saying goodbye or anything was a masterpiece of weird logic. The guy is dead, but Trevor or dad or someone forged a note from him saying he just up and left. So Angela is all pissed and sad, crying and saying stuff like "I knew this was just a summer thing, but that was a shitty thing to do, blah blah blah". And what is her solution? To wait as long as maybe 9 seconds and then ask the boyfriend of one of the other camp counselors to go have sex with her. Ha!
- The black guy in this movie was named Elvis. Kind of a strange touch. You don't see many black guys named Elvis.
- Speaking of the black guy, there was this one really stupid scene where he and the third (completely superfluous) female character have the "black guys always get killed first in horror movies" conversation. First of all, that conversation has been had in so many horror movies that at this point it is beyond tired. For another thing, this scene where they had the conversation was horrible. It was done in all one take, with the camera moving around. That in itself isn't so bad, but the cameraman kept moving between the sun and the actors, so about every 5 seconds we are treated to 'camera shadow', a sure sign of a director who doesn't pay attention. Not just once, but over and over again. Also, it was shot from a extreme low angle for some reason, which was really distracting.
- I had seen the cover box for this movie in Hollywood Video at one point, and it shows a guy in a hockey mask with a big meat hook in his hand. So it's a pretty safe bet that someone in this movie will be killed with a meat hook by a guy in a hockey mask, right? Wrong. No hockey mask, no meat hook. Trevor the Killer doesn't have a hockey mask, he has some generic thing that looks like a cross between the mask Michael Meyers wears and the one in the Scream movies. Weird.
- What the hell was with turning this movie into a Nancy Drew mystery toward the end? No one watches these to solve a mystery, they watch them to see people screwing and getting chopped to pieces. Hear me, directors, writers, et al.? Screwing and chopping, that's what your public wants, trust me.
- The credits at the end said "Shot on Fuji film", but if this wasn't shot on digital video I'll take back everything I said about Trevor being a scary name.
-----------------------
So what we have here is a pretty routine slasher flick, not much better or worse than the countless others out there. It was fun in spots, but I would have to say overall it lacked the sense of fun of some of the earlier entries in this genre. At the height of the slasher flick era in the 80's, there was (almost) always a sense of fun about these movies, like the filmmakers knew the movies weren't going to be that great, but they were having a ball making them. This one lacked that, and I believe suffered for it. Not as good (meaning cheesily enjoyable) as I hoped. 2 out of 5 cheese wheels. Kinda good times.
"And since I'm being fired anyway, you want to know what else grinds my gears? You, America. F%#k you." - FG
posted by Prophet422 at 8:40 AM
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