Terror Trap (2010)

Psychos in a backwoods hotel?  Unbelievable, right?  Terror Trap appears to be another installment in the Psycho ripoffs.  This one's got a cobbled-together cast of "oh, I know that guy" types including Michael Madsen, Jeff Fahey, David James Elliot, and Heather Marsden.  Madsen always seems to get top billing no matter how much he's actually in a movie, because come on, Reservoir Dogs was the shit.

Don (David James Elliot) and Nancy (Heather Marsden) are riding along in rural Louisiana when they are struck by a car that quickly drives away.  After waiting by their disabled car for a while, a weird sheriff (Jeff Fahey) shows up.  He explains that there are no tow trucks or car rentals available at this hour and they should stay at a nearby motel.  Clearly that's a stupid idea if I ever heard one, but they trek over anyway.  The hotel has a creepy front desk person and cameras that seem to be watching their every move.  The couple seems ridiculously naive, ignoring blood on the wall and screams from next door just so they can get a little shut eye.

Meanwhile, there's some sort of kidnapping/murder/hooker ring where people wear strange masks and Michael Madsen is somehow involved.  I worry that this is going to be one of those low-budget flicks with way too much going on when they could have kept it simple and more effective.  The couple is completely insufferable and I spend a lot of time hoping they will just die.  Then we have the Ukranian hookers yanked from the set of Taken and a bunch of truck drivers gawking at security cameras and it's a party.  Madsen waxes all philosophical stoner to distract us from the fact that this movie is going absolutely nowhere.  There is a lot of time taken up by people watching cameras and making phone calls.

When I told my husband I was watching this movie, he responded "haha, Terror Crap."   Little did I know he was right.  To call this a ripoff of Vacancy would probably be a compliment.  I understand that Madsen is trying to get an obscene amount of movies under his belt for some sort of self-satisfaction, but I really hope he can avoid junk like this in the future.

American Psycho 2 (2002)

If you're a Family Guy fan, you may find the narration of this movie a bit hard to take seriously, since it made me keep picturing Meg.  American Psycho 2 is a pretty senseless and unnecessary remake to the wildly successful American Psycho.

Rachael (Mila Kunis) was the sole survivor of murderer Patrick Bateman when she was a tween.  After escaping, she become obsessed with murder, and goes to college with the intent on eventually joining the FBI.  Apparently the only way to do this is to get the TA position in Prof. Starkman's (William Shatner) class.

Rachael works her butt off to have a perfect GPA and be a shoe-in for the position.  But several other less-deserving students are standing in her way, and Rachael is not having that.  She'll do absolutely anything to get to Quantico....and that means anything.  I was gearing myself up for the ending to be a straight-up ripoff of Urban Legend...and I was right.  That was a good ending though.

This movie is full of interludes full of chick power angst rock a la Bif Naked.  And the aforementioned Meg-narration.  Rachael seems to seamlessly get away with anything she wants to do, with no one being the wiser.  This movie wasn't actually horrible...it just was sort of nonsensical.  It sort of fits in with the early 2000 teen/college horror genre, but I'm not sure what this had to do with American Psycho except for some crazy made-up babysitter storyline.  They should have just called this shit Teacher's Pet or something and made it it's own movie.

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Fright World (2006)

Remember in college when you'd be partying in a frat house, and somehow you'd end up in that douchey blacklight room?  With the Bob Marley posters and light that made your clothes look dirty?  Well put that experience together with a long and horrible Marilyn Manson video and that's pretty much what you get with Fright World. 

I really have no idea what even happened in this movie.  It appears that there was a super-tacky theme park that was at one time operating and popular.  It got closed down and some sort of killer moved in.   His killing appeared to be limited to a chick in a large bra, but you know, tomato, tomato. 

Years (a year? it's hard to tell) later, some investor buys the park and decides to reopen.  But in the meantime, he invites a bunch of his goth friends over to play around.  Everyone basically drinks, smokes pot, and bangs, all while horrible metal wannabe music plays in the background.  We get glimpses of enough boobs to get my husband to hang out in front of the TV for a few minutes, but nothing to write home about.

Apparently this place is haunted by the spirit of Vernon Fell, the murderer of Fright World.  I didn't see too much murdering...mostly just scared goths running through a series of rooms, with horrible cinematography, lighting and editing.  Seriously, the filming of this was so bad that it's actually blurry throughout most of the movie.  This was far far far too long for a low-budget slasher.  I was hoping for a Funhouse ripoff but I got something that could have been made in my backyard.  Fail.

















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Final Stab (2001)

I think we've heard this premise before, but I have over 200 movies on my instant queue and I have to start somewhere.  The movie cover would make you think that this is a Scream ripoff, but it's really more reminiscent of April Fool's Day.  

Kristen is a rich bitch who has absolutely no regard for other people's feelings.  Under the guise of wanting to reunite with her sister, Angela, she stages a murder mystery game at an isolated house.  She completely disregards the fact that Angela's boyfriend Charlie is completely messed up in the head due to witnessing his parents' murder as a child.

Everyone in the house is playing along with the murder game, except for Angela and Charlie, who have no idea what's going on.  The fake murderer is an actor wearing a lame mask, and kind of half-assing the whole performance.  However, there's a real killer lurking and he's killing people...for real.

I mean, sure, this was nothing original, but this wasn't a terrible movie.  The kills weren't that bloody, but the killer was sort of a surprise.  The ending sort of left it open for a Final Stab 2 but I'm pretty glad that didn't happen.  The acting was pretty standard for a B-grade slasher, and I wonder if they were going for an 80s-esque feel with the whole thing, because that's how it came across.  Not a classic, but not a horrible waste of your time either.















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When a Killer Calls (2006)

When I first started watching this movie, I had to double-check IMDB to make sure it wasn't from the 80s.  The video quality is so shitty that I thought it couldn't possibly be from this decade.  After checking that, I had to make sure that this wasn't made by my little cousin and his FlipCam.  Another negative, so although you wouldn't have guessed it, this movie is made by actual filmmakers, less than 5 years ago.  Moving on.

We open on a brutal scene of bondage and stabbing, including doing so with kids.   He captures it all on his cellphone, presumably to post to Facebook and tag friends.  Or Twitter?  I don't know how this dude rolls.  After a pretty cool knife death, we switch up the setting.

Trisha is a babysitter.  An extremely irresponsible one.  Basically, the parents lay down some pretty basic rules for her: no visitors, no ice cream for the kid, and bed at 9pm.  She breaks all of them in record time, making me wonder why anyone entrusts their kids with this stupid chick.  She spends the majority of the babysitting time on the phone with her boyfriend.  Soon enough, she starts receiving creepy calls on her phone from a "restricted" number.  In the vein of the many babysitter movies that came before it, the mystery man calls repeatedly, alternately wanting to chat and reminding Trisha to check on her babysitting charge.

Predictably, she finally gives in and calls the police, where they direct her on how to trace the call.  Their directions actually seem to make zero sense whatsoever, but I'm too concerned with waiting for the moment that they tell her the calls are coming from inside the house.  Guess I'm a traditionalist.

However, the calls decline and the douche factor rises and we get stuck in sort of a non-scary holding pattern for a bit.  But then my patience pays off as we're treated to an ultra creepy killer and some pretty solid death scenes.  This movie was actually not so bad overall.  It certainly wasn't in the realm of When a Stranger Calls or even Babysitter Wanted, but it wasn't completely horrendous either.  The picture and sound quality was pretty bad, and the acting is about what you'd expect.  The killer's motivation was actually pretty original and although the ending was "meh," at least they didn't drag this shit out and leave it open for "When a Killer Gets a New Cell Phone" or some crap.

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Fear Dot Com (2002)

I've seen this movie once before, and I was pretty sure that it was super-lame, but I decided to give it another chance for the sake of a review.  This movie is kind of a ripoff of Ringu/The Ring only with a website instead of a video.  The premise is that you go to this website to watch people get killed, and after you see it, you die within 48 hours.  Strangely enough, your death is caused by your worst fear.  The people in this movie have odd fears -- one guy dies in a car crash, one person drowns in the bath, one person is hit by a subway. and one person is seemingly scared to death by cockroaches.  This other person dies in a jail cell and I'm not sure if that's their worst fear, or if that's how they had to die because they were stuck there.  Anyway, I digress.

Stephen Dorff is Mike Reilly, a burnt out NYC detective who is distressed because a previous case he worked on, "The Doctor" has not been solved.  But now there's a new case to be cracked.  People are dying randomly in NYC and being found looking super-scared and with bloody eyes.  Those in charge immediately think it's a virus and bring in Terry from the Department of Health (Natascha McElhone).  But tests and autopsies show that it's not a virus at all and something else is afoot.

You would think it would be time for the DOH to be taken off the case since it's not a virus, but not in this movie.  Terry and Mike band together to solve the mystery.  As it turns out, the victims all have one thing in common -- they've all visited the feardotcom website prior to death.  Additionally, there appears to be some sort of little girl bouncing a ball involved in this nonsense. 

Blah blah blah Doctor's former victim blah blah blah torture chamber.  If this movie said "Want to Play?" a la Chucky one more time, I was probably going to lose it.  And in the end, I still couldn't figure out how the website was doing what it was doing.  This movie somehow got two watches from me, but gets the same verdict.  Skip it.
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Are You Scared? (2006)

The writers of this movie must have literally seen the Saw series, rewrote it with crappier dialogue and the EXACT SAME PREMISE, and somehow sold it as a movie. Maybe they were hoping to capture the 0.00001% of horror fans that didn't catch the Saw series, which is blatantly released every Halloween like clockwork.

Are You Scared has a group of 20-somethings trapped in an abandoned warehouse. They're all really confused until they remember that they all tried out for this reality show about their worst fear. So, I guess don't investigate any further, this would be it!

Instead of Jigsaw/creepy tricycle puppet, a mysterious voice comes over the loudspeaker, belonging to a deformed middle aged dude in a control room. It's time for the games to begin! This group is complete with a totally annoying token black guy, whose stomach has been slashed open and bandaged...but he just figures it's part of the game (I bet MTV has some sort of disclosure for gaping abdomen wounds).

The first "game" is a direct ripoff of the surgically implanted key thing from the Saw series. Then to mix it up a bit, the next challenge involves twins (a boy and girl that act a little too close for comfort) and we basically get a replay of that drill to the head scene from Saw.

The games continue until one girl, the "hero" of the movie remains. There's a lot of running around and screaming, and it reveals that her worst fear is someone finding out her secret (dun dun dun) The twist is boring and sort of predictable and nowhere near the caliber of the first Saw.

Lesson learned from this movie: don't blantanly rip off scripts and try to pass them off as an original movie. Epic fail.

Grade: F (When A Killer Calls -- blatant and ridiculous copy of another better movie)