I should stop being lazy and start this back up again... I've watched a few more and have not yet posted...
Here goes...
Kill Theory
It's interesting. I watched Kill Theory after the boyfriend and I had watched End of the Line, a surprisingly successful little indie cult/supernatural film that we picked up on a whim at Blockbuster. The reason why I call out End of the Line here is that what made it "surprisingly" successful is that it managed to create an incredibly believable sense of dread with a plot line that I honestly didn't think I would be able to believe... But the writing and acting were so solid that the film sold me into believing the dread, the helplessness, and the horror of the situation...
And then there was Kill Theory.
Basic Plot Line:
Whilst celebrating a graduation at a secluded vacation home, a group of college students find themselves targeted by a sadistic killer who forces them to play a deadly game of killing one another in order to survive.
OK. Sure. We've seen that before: Battle Royale, the Saw Franchise to a certain extent... It's been done successfully in both of those cases (while I'm not the biggest Saw fan, it's undeniable how incredibly popular those movies are), and I was expecting the same here: A derivation that I was hoping would "surprise" me...
Nope.
What makes the aforementioned
End of the Line and
Battle Royale so successful is that you are able to suspend your disbelief and truly emphasize with the helplessness and the horror that our victims are going through... You also accept unquestioningly the Power of their victimizer(s) and the dread of the situation because the movies are so artfully done that you have no other option but to get drawn in...
Not so with
Kill Theory. Right off the bat, our Killer is set up like a Jigsaw knockoff, complete with video tapes and a bad voicebox... I understand that Jigsaw was iconic, but COME ON - A little originality would have been refreshing.
But silly killer aside, even without his voice box, I honestly had a difficult time believing what a true threat he was to our victims; I had a hard time allowing myself to believe that they were truly "trapped" by him - The writer/director did not really do a whole lot to build up what a "threat" our victimizer is (or SHOULD be - I mean, he captured EIGHT PEOPLE in a house - He should be pretty damn BADASS if you ask me!!); I spent a lot of the time thinking of ways that they could evade him, but they repeatedly made poor decisions that, in my mind wrote their own deathnotes...
So, in short:
- Bad pacing
- Unsuccessful mood
- REALLY poor writing (a line from the film: "Their love will kill us all!")
- Uninspired plot and story
- Victims making repeatedly stupid decisions in attempts to save themselves from a Killer who wasn't successfully developed as a threat in the first place.
2/5 (though I have to admit, I didn't even FINISH this one; I turned it off... ugh... Better than The Graves, but only slightly... I can see fans of that particular sub-genre being more sympathetic to it than I was)