The DVD Pile

This low-budget comedy horror film tries very hard and you can certainly see it was made with people with a passion for the film they are making but the writing is not very good and the comedy suffers from perhaps not really being bold enough.

Six friends in a minivan drive up to a small town in Maine for a break and we get a caption to introduce them just like happens in a couple of better known films. It’s a bit unnecessary since it really doesn’t take long for the characters to be obvious. There’s the slut Nicole (Kayle Blogna), the jock Iraq war vet. Monroe (Monroe Mann who is one of the film’s writer/directors), the girlfriend Lori (Kate Costello), the sister Hilary (Crystal Arnette), the black guy Lamont (Justin Brown) and the nerd Ronnie (Ronnie Khalil another writer/director)  who is a Stephen King fan. Ronnie is really keen to meet the man himself but they find the locals turn a bit hostile and unhelpful when Stephen King’s name gets mentioned.

Monroe and Hilary’s late grandparents own a house by the lake so they want to hire a boat and have some fun playing on the lake but the boat warden tells them to go to the next lake and won’t rent them a boat. He agrees to rent them a boat after Nicole uses her breasts to persuade him.

Lamont goes to get fuel for the car and drive up to the house while the other five are going by boat. Ronnie gets serious travel sickness so Monroe drops him off at the house while they have fun water-skiing around the lake making lots of noise until they get pulled up by a cop in a boat for making too much noise and going too fast.

Next the film moves into the main plot of killing off these annoying college kids. I think they may have had the ambition to make kills like some of the more memorable kills from King stories but their budget for effects have limited them to less familiar but easier to film kills.

There’s a lot of references throughout to Stephen king stories as well as elements from other horror films in the soundtrack. There’s even a dream sequence that is really crude parody of scenes from the Shining. It reminded me of the type of stuff from those terrible parody films with shallow jokes that are based on caricatures of films based on their trailers. Stephen King has such a familiar style that it is ripe for comedy but this film never really gets beyond the few scenes and references. Monroe has couple of funny bits when the film decides to take the piss out of the war vet clichés but the bits with Ronnie just annoyed me. This film was just not to my taste though it wasn’t completely incompetent and is filmed quite well.

Rating 4.0/10

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