I watched this film last weekend, and am shocked at how this ever got made, let alone made it to the cinema. This is horror movie making by numbers with nothing new to say, but it fatally flawed from the start to the end.
The plot summary is simply a young school boy is mocked by 5 female peers, and then 10 years later proceeds to murder the 5 women systematically.
For starters, the shoes the killer wears only make a noise when appropriate.
The interplay between the police officer and Denise Richard's character doesn't go anywhere, and when it does, it comes out of the blue. Denise Richard has an attitude with the police officer for no apparent reason long before they have their "encounter". The police officer is there to help them, not make their lives hell. The way they act, you are glad when they meet their doom, because they are a pretty unlikeable group of girls.
The film ineptly tries to throw you off the scent by present a few oddballs to suspect, but these are so badly done, you cannot trust the film makers.
There is a bewildering array of characters which arrive and simply make the job of following the basic plot almost impossible.
The main 4 characters have so little in common, along with absolutely no establishing shots, you are left wondering why these people ever came together in the first place.
The film employs no flashbacks, meaning you cannot connect modern day characters with their high school counterparts, it might as well have been a different set of characters.
Events, meetings, parties and shows happen in the film without any forewarning , meaning as a viewer you are left watching a myriad of images that make no sense and are genuinely pointless in the story, along with dialog that leaves you literally out in the cold by discussing events and topics of which you have no knowledge of. Its like they are bitching behind you the viewers back, and leaving you to feel triumphant at their demise.
About halfway through the film, the scriptwriter (and I use the term loosely) is making this up as he goes along, as while watching this film you quickly realize no thought went into this film other than the next shot. At certain moments in the film things just happen or come up in conversation that are so left-field of what would be considered normal trains of thought. E.g. Plastic Surgery, the concept that the killer may have had surgery to look different suddenly turns up as the scriptwriter suddenly realizes he needs a plausible reason why the killer looks nothing like the boy in the opening sequence. The actually killer is such a huge bloke, that not only would he need total plastic surgery, but also a full body transplant. The film tries to throw you by showing you a guy who looks like the boy in the opening sequence too. And finally, the detective is looking for a man with the initials "JM", and all the dead women so far have received a valentines card with the initials "JM", and not one of them makes the connection. When they sit down and try to think of all the men they know with JM as initials they recount a massive long list, but not the killer. All I can say these women must be an impressive bunch of whores to have so many men in their lives with "JM", hell, there's a whole alphabet waiting for them in the sequels.
Stuff that doesn't make sense include, Maggots in chocolate sweets, how they hell does one put live maggots into them? The classic horror movie mistake is using the recognizable villain in his hockey mask, or leather faced mask. In this epic, we have the villain wearing a cherub's mask, except the only people who see it are dead. So when the "heroine" sees it she screams and runs without knowing anything. She suddenly has attained the knowledge of the viewer without any effort at all.
This film fails on so many grounds and I hope to have highlighted a few here. But why did I watch it to the end? Its one of those films where I wasn't going to let its inane style stop me from watching the end, which was as predictable as I imagined it to be. Plus I wanted to see how bad it could get at the end, a denouement in my opinion can save a terrible film.
The plot summary is simply a young school boy is mocked by 5 female peers, and then 10 years later proceeds to murder the 5 women systematically.
For starters, the shoes the killer wears only make a noise when appropriate.
The interplay between the police officer and Denise Richard's character doesn't go anywhere, and when it does, it comes out of the blue. Denise Richard has an attitude with the police officer for no apparent reason long before they have their "encounter". The police officer is there to help them, not make their lives hell. The way they act, you are glad when they meet their doom, because they are a pretty unlikeable group of girls.
The film ineptly tries to throw you off the scent by present a few oddballs to suspect, but these are so badly done, you cannot trust the film makers.
There is a bewildering array of characters which arrive and simply make the job of following the basic plot almost impossible.
The main 4 characters have so little in common, along with absolutely no establishing shots, you are left wondering why these people ever came together in the first place.
The film employs no flashbacks, meaning you cannot connect modern day characters with their high school counterparts, it might as well have been a different set of characters.
Events, meetings, parties and shows happen in the film without any forewarning , meaning as a viewer you are left watching a myriad of images that make no sense and are genuinely pointless in the story, along with dialog that leaves you literally out in the cold by discussing events and topics of which you have no knowledge of. Its like they are bitching behind you the viewers back, and leaving you to feel triumphant at their demise.
About halfway through the film, the scriptwriter (and I use the term loosely) is making this up as he goes along, as while watching this film you quickly realize no thought went into this film other than the next shot. At certain moments in the film things just happen or come up in conversation that are so left-field of what would be considered normal trains of thought. E.g. Plastic Surgery, the concept that the killer may have had surgery to look different suddenly turns up as the scriptwriter suddenly realizes he needs a plausible reason why the killer looks nothing like the boy in the opening sequence. The actually killer is such a huge bloke, that not only would he need total plastic surgery, but also a full body transplant. The film tries to throw you by showing you a guy who looks like the boy in the opening sequence too. And finally, the detective is looking for a man with the initials "JM", and all the dead women so far have received a valentines card with the initials "JM", and not one of them makes the connection. When they sit down and try to think of all the men they know with JM as initials they recount a massive long list, but not the killer. All I can say these women must be an impressive bunch of whores to have so many men in their lives with "JM", hell, there's a whole alphabet waiting for them in the sequels.
Stuff that doesn't make sense include, Maggots in chocolate sweets, how they hell does one put live maggots into them? The classic horror movie mistake is using the recognizable villain in his hockey mask, or leather faced mask. In this epic, we have the villain wearing a cherub's mask, except the only people who see it are dead. So when the "heroine" sees it she screams and runs without knowing anything. She suddenly has attained the knowledge of the viewer without any effort at all.
This film fails on so many grounds and I hope to have highlighted a few here. But why did I watch it to the end? Its one of those films where I wasn't going to let its inane style stop me from watching the end, which was as predictable as I imagined it to be. Plus I wanted to see how bad it could get at the end, a denouement in my opinion can save a terrible film.