Monday, May 25, 2009

Happy Memorial Day.

Memorial Day
Here's a review of probably the worse plagiarisms of Friday The 13th (aside from Camp Daze, maybe) I have ever seen. Regardless, it's a solid shot on DV effort and I like to suggest this movie.




Rachel can’t remember the last time she feel asleep without hearing the screams from her past. Three years ago, her brother mysteriously died while she and a group of friends partied by the lakeside. And this weekend, she and her friends are returning to the very same lake to finally put her nightmares to rest. As they try to come to grips with what happened and admit that her brothers’ death was an accident. Someone is waiting for her, someone who is a faceless killer. And as her friends start disappearing one by one, Rachel will discover whose identity is hidden behind the murderous mask. Is it just a stranger in the woods? Or is it someone she already knows?

Watching this movie brings back feelings of good ole backwoods slasher movies like Friday The 13th, The Burning, Madman and Bloody Murder. The movie is an obvious take from Friday The 13th, right down to the back story. The script and plot aren't great, but it gets right down to the point. One thing I did like about the story was the twist at the end (every movie seems to have them now). When I watched the movie I suspected both obvious people that you were meant to suspect, and then we see who was the real killer, and who started everything. I thought the ending was far from brilliant, but very well done. The location was great, it's too bad they weren't able to utilize the cabins and camp other than a couple shots.

I have no clue who these "actors" were, but they were very bad and very annoying. While, the 3 more important characters were about as good as you can get in a low budget production, but still horribly over acted, and made me want to gouge out my eyes and ears. The blood was almost nil,and the deaths weren't very well done. I thought the movie started off too fast, there was really no character development before they started dying off one-by-one. I think the characters could have been developed to the point where anyone could have been the killer, but that didn't happen. The killer was an obvious Jason Voorhees ripoff, but that wasn't a bad thing. The bad thing was that Trevor Moorhouse (Bloody Murder 1 and 2) was a more intimidating killer, and that is just pathetic.

Memorial Day is a good movie to kick back to on a Sunday and watch, it rates up there with Bloody Murder, Adam & Evil and Generation Ax. The movie doesn't play well when actually looking for an interesting movie, it plays well when you want to watch something short and something that you can laugh at. The movie isn't that bad considering the movie was made on a minuscule budget, and was made as a carbon-copy Friday The 13th. Yes, the blood, deaths, acting and dialog could have been much better. But, it is a backwoods slasher, we see people die. We see boobs, we have the slasher staple "camp fire" scene, we have a solid back story/legend to base more movies on, we have just about everything a million dollar slasher movie has (other than the things I listed that it lacks!). When I watched this, I really didn't hate it, I didn't love it, but I did like it. I like movies that play like fan films, and in my opinion this was nothing more than an homage to the backwoods slasher genre.

1 comment:

  1. Wow - Memorial Day? We've ALMOST got a full calendar year of holiday-appropriate horror.
    -Your pals at http://www.24hourstomidnight.wordpress.com

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