Killer Movie (2008)

What I’m Watching
Killer Movie (2008. Directed by Jeff Lawrence Fisher)
Disclaimer: Total Spoiler Alert – if you want to watch this piece of crap, I don’t suggest reading this review!

Killer Movie is a 100% typical teen slasher movie. What sparked my initial interest in this movie was the cast. It stars Paul Wesley, who currently stars as Stefan in Vampire Diaries. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I’m a fan of the show, but indeed I am. The movie also has a small cameo by Nestor Carbonell, who most people know as the ageless Richard Alpert on Lost, as well as Mayor Garcia in the mega-hit, The Dark Knight. That alone gave me incentive to watch the movie. Overall, I feel like this movie had a lot of potential, but it was executed horribly.

The storyline is fairly straightforward. Paul Wesley plays Jake Tanner, a small time director who is brought on by big time agent Seaton Brookstone (Carbonell) to take directorial charge of a reality show. In North Dakota, a small (hick) town’s high school hockey team is making it big, and a reality show following the team’s success. The reality show’s production crew serves as our main cast. While the plot unfolds, the crew has a little behind the scenes solo interviews, such as we see in most reality shows on television. Along with the crew, a big time reality star and part time blonde bitch named aptly named Blanca Champion (Kaley Cuoco) comes onto the project as a PA for film research. However, the death of a local teen named Jaynie (Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester), sets off a string of mysterious “accidental” deaths. This gives the reality show crew a new idea for a TV program: investigate and solve the small town murder. While production resumes and the death toll rises, the audience is shown hidden camera feeds set up by our killer. Usually these hidden feeds show us a character’s murder. Anyways, shit hits the fan, people get killed off one by one, and it ends with most of the cast dead, everyone else traumatized, and the killer somehow escaping.

Where to begin with my complaints? I guess I should begin with the terrible ending. Throughout the entire movie, it was blatantly obvious who the killer was. I was hoping SO MUCH that the movie did this to set up for some mind-blowing twist. Nope! There was no twist. The creepy sound guy whom no one knew previously and who disappeared whenever someone was killed ended up being a psycho stalker who escaped from a mental institution and started killing. How stereotypical. Oh, but it gets worse! Our crazy killer, once unmasked (with dramatic mascara running down his face like a sad clown) gets killed. Or so it seems. Dude gets shot, and we literally see him get put into a body bag. Outside the school where all this shit has gone down, ambulances, police, and other personal are lollygagging around the scene, while our remaining cast sits outside; traumatized. SOMEHOW amidst all these people, our dead killer crawls out of his body bag and escapes! Yup, the dead nutter escaped. They find a bulletproof vest (how they didn’t notice that first is beyond me), and clearly the killer ran off into the woods. The credits start to roll, and next to them, run more of the behind-the-scenes interviews with the crew. In these, they “explain” all the impossibilities that we were presented with. Such as “Oh well, it turns out this psycho took some sort of pill that dropped all his vitals so he seemed dead, and then he recovered in the body bag, and escaped. OH OF COURSE, now it all makes sense! And when Jake Tanner’s leg gets trapped in a fucking BEAR TRAP, some kid just happens to swing by and just happens to know how to unhinge the trap. “Lucky he was there”. Naturally! It REALLY ticked me off that after the movie was over; the credits had to explain away all the questions and impossibilities that the audience has. It was just terrible. Oh, and people who were killed off also miraculously came back to life during the credits to say their piece. The camera guy who was killed after working out came back to say something along the lines of “Well, I guess I shouldn’t have gone to the gym.” Corny.

The script was also quite crap. 1% of the lines were solid and funny. The remaining 99% of the script sucked. I found that only 3 characters delivered strong performances. Paul Wesley is a solid actor and was believable and likeable throughout the movie. Second, Robert Buckley as “Nik”, a guy on the production crew had a lot of funny one-liners. Unfortunately, they killed him off pretty early. Last, the saving grace of the film was the cameo role by Nestor Carbonell. Most of his short scenes were in the behind-the-scenes interviews. He plays a super scumbag agent and is pretty hysterical.

The movie is really awful, especially for quality film/horror appreciators. It’s full of cheesy situations, extremely pointless characters, horrible writing, mostly horrible acting, annoying and unlikable characters, and plotholes the size of the Grand Canyon. And, of course, there are the hardcore lesbian scenes as an added bonus for glam/ horny teens. Everything about this movie screams stereotype. (The gore wasn’t even that great either).

Among all the horsecrap to sift through, this IS probably a great movie for young teens, especially as a date movie. It’s hard not to be so critical on this movie, but I felt like I wasted 92 minutes of my life. Then again, I know I was not among the intended target audience, so I’m not surprised about my reaction. That’s sometimes what you get with campy slasher flicks. You can’t always get what you want.