Trip Day 10.
On February 7th, my wife and I went on a trip to sunny California. We started in LA, visiting a friend for a couple of days, and over the next week slowly drove up the coast to finish things up in San Francisco. It was rad! But, it made watching a movie every day/writing about it quite difficult. As committed as I am to this thing, I can't justify missing out on a potentially once-in-a-lifetime trip to blog about a terrible indie-slasher, you know? Plus, I think it's wise to occasionally do things with your spouse.
So things will be a little different for the next 11 entries. I managed to watch the movies, but rather than writing about them as I normally do, I'll do a quick little synopsis, a little imdb research, quote some of the reviews (can you do that?) and bounce off of them. Followed up with my general impressions. Okay, thanks!
California is pretty sweet.
Terrified
Some dour guy majoring in psychology wants to write a term paper on the subject of terror, theorizing about how everyone has a point where they will snap if they are too scared, or something. He ends up going to find some friends in an old ghost town, and gets some first-hand experience in his area of study. A sack-masked crazy guy (I hesitate to say killer - maybe terrorizer) toys with him by engineering a variety of situations where the college boy could either get very scared or even killed - such as a room slowly filling up with water, or a room with a bunch of spiders in it.
imdb plot keywords, because they are occasionally funny:
bound and gagged / noose / fistfight / organ music / tied to a chair
Reviews:
while this movie can't be considered "great" or "good", it does have a fair number of effective moments. The ghost town makes a nice creepy location, especially with the night-time shooting.
-Thanks "Wizard-8" via imdb
Yeah, "good" would be pushing it a bit. Terrified is a little bit interesting in that it plays like a very early pre-cursor to Saw/trap-style horror movies. Our main character is incapacitated, placed in an elaborate trap - only to escape and get into another one. Most of the traps themselves are really nothing special (especially by today's standards), but the introduction to the film has a person being buried alive in wet cement - it's pretty disturbing. It actually sets the bar a little too high - nothing that follows ever really comes close.
The location works to an extent - it's sets an okay mood but seems pretty well kept-up for a "ghost town." It's not all that well integrated into the story though - you just get the idea that they needed an isolated place to shoot and there was a ghost town available - there is nothing here that couldn't be done in an old mansion or an abandoned train-station (I'm just snowballing here).
...it cannot claim to be well paced. The idea of a hooded maniac stalking his victims has become quite a cliché since the early sixties, but this appears to be the first horror film that used it.
-Thanks "kevin olzak" via imdb
Terrified is in fact a little boring. There are other characters milling about that are necessary to make a full movie (college boy's friends who are out searching for him), but they have little bearing on the main story. Their scenes sort of stop the momentum of the whole thing. Although you do periodically need a break from the terrorizing, so it serves it's purpose, I guess. And regarding the mask - I personally have a hard time believing this is the very first "hooded maniac" - it's basically an executioner's mask. Those *had* to have been around before then, right? But it's still pretty creepy looking.
There are some weird sounds going on in the background to set you on edge.The maniac is pretty twisted and there is a real sense of isolation about this film.
-Thanks "evilskip" via imdb
I don't recall any really creepy noises, other than the terrorizer just whispering sweet nothings about what his victim should/shouldn't do, how he's going to die, etc. It's moderately effective in a sort of nostalgic way... like listening to a radio play. And while there is a sense of isolation here, the sets look a little to clean to really get any feeling of desolation from the abandoned town.
Final Thoughts:
Eh, it's not a terrible movie, but it's not very engaging either. Other than being noteworthy as a distant, elder relative of the Saw / torture-porn genre, it's just kind of there.
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