If You Have to Have a Blackout, Best to Have It During This Movie

 

I love the horror genre. It has the potential to do things to an audience that no other type of film can. A great horror film may change the way we think, feel, and process. 

A terrible one makes you question a lot of your life choices.

Quick Plot: Stop me if you've heard this one: a batch of attractive strangers awakens in a dirty but highly secure locked down warehouse with no memory of how any of them got there. The brick walls and bolted doors are impossible to break, even with the handful of rusted weapons scattered about. A sad little television set is their sole connection to the outside.

The only channel it shows comes courtesy of the mysterious Dr. Kasuma, a calmly deranged scientist who informs them that they're now part of her experiment. When the television shows a timer countdown, one subject has 15 minutes to kill a person in the room or risk someone they love being gassed to death onscreen. 

The rules are fairly simple. Unless you're an idiot. 

Surprise! EVERYONE in this movie is, indeed, an idiot. Sure, you can forgive the first contestant for doubting the validity of, you know, murder, but by the third cycle, it's really on you. Even if, spoiler alert for a movie you should absolutely not see, Dr. Kusama doesn't keep her word. 

What IS this? Or rather, why, in 2021, 17 years after the first Saw gave birth to an easily-executable-on-a-small-budget subgenre, do you decide to make a movie like this? We've seen some fun takes: Saw with a shark, Saw as a plea to fund high school musicals, Saw reality TV, and so on. The problem with a bad Saw ripoff is that it reminds you just how empty the genre can be.

There is nothing of value to be found in The Blackout Experiment. The inexperienced actors try (at times too hard) but have no real support behind them to make anything register. The look is bland. The actual sound, garbled (though the dialogue gives you nothing of value, so perhaps it's not a loss). Our villain has no spark nor clear motivation. None of the characters do a thing to warrant our sympathy, though one comes somewhat close only for the film to scream at us that he deserves to die. We don't even have exciting violence. Every attack happens during the blackout, despite the rules being VERY clear that kills have to happen before. 

I guess what I'm really saying is that it's unfair that the characters in The Blackout Experiment didn't have to actually watch The Blackout Experiment. Then again, no one really deserves that kind of fate. 

High Points

It makes dreadful use of all of its 81 minutes, but hey! At least it's only 81 minutes!

Low Points

Aforementioned 81 minutes

Lessons Learned

It takes more than killing a hot chick trying to hack you down with an axe to know what it means to survive

Even if you steal all her boyfriends and her money, a good little sister will love you til the end (even if that end is entirely your fault)

You have to do what a girl holding a gun tells you to do

Rent/Bury/Buy

Oof. Unless you're a completist for these kinds of films (aka the masochist that is me) there is no value of any kind to be found in The Blackout Experiment. Skip it on Amazon Prime. 

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Theater Kid Spurned

 

Saw ripoffs have a very, very special place in my heart. They're mostly terrible but sometimes, if you're lucky, they're terrible in such bizarre ways that you can't help but be entertained.

Quick Plot: Eight adults awaken in ugly jumpsuits and an uglier dungeon furnished with a toolbox of weapons and a camera to watch their moves. Yes, it's the same setup as at least ten low budget horror movies a year post-Saw, but this one has one of the more hilarious twists I've ever seen (and folks, I've seen a LOT of these kinds of movies).

See normally, "eight adults" is actually "eight strangers" but in this case, they're coworkers. From the janitor to the superintendent, it's a full roster of high school employees who were all complicit in the suicide of a former teacher. Their crime?

Hold onto your diploma for my favorite SPOILER ALERT of all time: they defunded the theater department.

No, seriously.

See, the late teacher in question lost her reason to live after she lost the chance to direct an adaptation of And Then There Were None (which according to this film's exposition, was a "short story turned into a play written by Agatha Christie"). This led her bitter mother to hire assassin The Warden played by a fully masked Costas Mandylor (as if this production couldn't afford his cheekbones) to kidnap a batch of the people she held responsible to broadcast their torture across The Internet.

Yes, there's an INTERNET component to this movie, which brings in my other favorite element of Death Count: THE COPS.

Michael Madsen "stars" as the veteran detective who misses the old days (you know, before kids did things like TEXTING). After having far too great a time making jokes about the possible mutilation and death of 8 (fairly) innocent people, he and his partner are able to locate the game, thanks in no small part to that AWFUL thing called "the internet".

In their defense, there's little to WANT to save about these people. Aside from our lead Rachel (probably the only passable performance by Sarah French), these characters are not just stupid, but inconsistently stupid. The Warden issues clear instructions with clear, proven consequences (Battle Royale head explosion devices, mustard gas poisoning, and so on). Every round, one player vehemently refuses to participate and dies horribly while the others scream at them to just follow the rules. The next round, one of the former screamers...vehemently refuses to participate and dies horribly.

At just 82 minutes (the last two of which switch gears to an even more hilarious commentary by strangers who watched the events of the movie on the INTERNET) Death Count wastes little time. It probably couldn't, as it seems fairly clear that actors filmed most of their scenes over the course of a day or two (more likely, a day...probably, a morning). 

This is my kind of mess.

High Points
Nothing here looks pretty, but credit must be given to the effects team who do some genuinely gnarly work when it comes to the horrific death devices

Low Points

The "lots of stressed kidnappees screaming wildly" element is standard for these kinds of movies, but that doesn't mean it's ever enjoyable

Kooky Credits
I always enjoy the "special thanks" section of a movie like this and by golly, Death Count did not disappoint because this film has FOUR categorizations of gratitude in an order that makes me even more confused. In descending order, we get:
1) WISH TO THANK
2) VERY SPECIAL THANKS
3) SPECIAL THANKS
4) THANKS

Shockingly, "the filmmakers of Saw" are never mentioned, which is strange because the movie itself name-checks that franchise at least four times.

Lessons Learned
Qualifications for being the superintendent do not include knowing how fire works

A good detective never wastes a half-eaten banana

Friendship should be earned, not retweeted

Rent/Bury/Buy
If I wasn't clear, let me be so here: this is a terrible movie. You will hate everyone on camera, chuckle at their ineptitude, then roar at the extreme way they're punished. Sadly we don't have any Saw sharks, but Michael Madsen gets to cash his check and writers Rolfe Kanefsky and Michael Merino teach an intense lesson about what happens when you defund the arts. Required viewing for school boards everywhere.

9 Soon to Be Dead

 

We've talked about this before: I have a soft spot for early 2000s Saw-ish low budget thrillers about strangers being locked in a space until one emerges the survivor. I am, at heart, a very simple person.

So here's a new one.

Quick Plot: A foggy credits montage sees 9 unrelated adults chloroformed and abducted, later awakening in a sterile mansion where all of the windows and doors have been bricked shut. A voice from hidden speakers announces the plan: they are strangers, not connected in any way, and only one can walk out the door $5 million richer. That's all he's saying, so have at it.

Surprisingly, a few of the characters have clearly seen a Nine Dead or two and immediately start looking for traps or timers. But nope, our announcer wasn't lying. There are no tricks. Bland food will be dispensed every few hours. The water is running. There are enough sharp objects hanging around to make murder possible. It's all up to them.

"Them" is your fairly typical batch of low budget horror fodder: a sympathetic chorus girl dancer, shamed tennis pro turned party girl, bickering married couple, bitter parolee, aspiring rapper, uppity fashion designer, police officer complete with a loaded gun, and an Irish priest played by Dennis Hopper.

No, seriously.

Seeing Hopper slumming it in a movie I never knew existed is a surprise, but for the most part, that's where the shocks end. Philippe Vidal's script lets the story darken at just the right point, though the immediate mayhem that comes after feels somehow rushed.

Directed by the I Spit On Your Grave remake's Steven Monroe, House of 9 is, to put it plainly (and rhymingly), fine. The better-than-average cast is peppered with European actors that you since recognize as having gone on to have legitimate careers, and it lets them eke out more interesting characters than the fairly flat screenplay lays out. I've seen so many of these kinds of films that I was genuinely pleased to realize the watcher's introduction wasn't a lie. This is a situation organized entirely to see what nine strangers will do to survive (and win a lot of money).

On one hand, House of 9 is far less wackily interesting than a lot of the other random titles that came out around the same time. No aliens, no six degrees of separation connections, no mazes. It still packs the same nihilistic attitude widespread in the genre (and I mean the particular subgenre of the early aughts) but with a slightly (and I mean slightly) higher quality than most of its competition. 

High Points

Sometimes it's hard to clearly identify how a cast elevates a mediocre setup, but let me give you a key example: Peter Capaldi's line reading of "my coat is in there" after the gang has decided to lock the possibly manslaughtering rapper in their bedroom is so perfectly played that it gave me a genuine laugh.

Low Points

All that's to say that there still isn't very much here that you haven't seen before, and most of it is stuff few actually LIKE seeing

Lessons Learned

Artists don't make money (but they do sleep with their glasses on)

When assigning roommates in a volatile situation, maybe read the room a little closer and rather than trust pure chance, don't pair people who have already expressed extreme rage at each other together

Nothing helps to meet that runtime more effectively than a montage taken seriously

Rent/Bury/Buy

If you're part of that fairly quiet horror contingent that actually enjoys exploring the myriad of low budget "strangers trapped in a room until most of them die at the hands of a well-spoken but invisible monster" subgenre, then House of 9 is certainly worth your time. No, it's not "good," but it's far higher quality than a whole else that came out in those early post-Saw years. To my knowledge, it's also the only one that stars Dennis Hopper as a kind priest so if that's your thing, have at it!

JigJaws

 

You know how ever horror subgenre runs the risk of repetition? We can only have so many high school reunion slashers and inbred rural cannibal families run amok before we need to do SOMETHING original, like send our earth-bound maniac to space. 

I haven't seen a Saw-inspired And Then There Were None-ish film make it off the earth just yet (and yes, consider this a formal request) but now it pleases me TREMENDOUSLY to announce that I've seen something I never even thought should exist, and yet now, I can't imagine how I lived without it:

a Jigsaw count'em down where Jigsaw is essentially a shark. 

Quick Plot: We open to find a smarmy lawyer named Henry shackled above a large indoor swimming pool, a deep automated voice warning him that he's about to meet his fate. Cue the countdown timer, screamed pleas, and chain drag into water where ominous chomping tones sound. 

Henry, of course, is just the appetizer. It's time to meet the main dinner party guests, all of whom are hiding some kind of crime that the late defense attorney helped them evade. Zara, a young woman whose husband is rotting in jail for something she hints at being responsible for, is arguably our hero, though that's really just because she gets the most screentime. 

Everyone seems pretty terrible. So yes, this is a Saw knockoff...

WITH A MOTHERF*CKING SHARK!

That's really all there is to say. Characters scramble to confess their sins when the timer goes off, never being honest enough to merit full forgiveness. A repeated underwater view of a decently CGI-rendered shark swims by, screaming happens, and BAM! We're out in 80 minutes.

The cast is serviceable, though it's a missed opportunity that they don't get to dig very deep. There's little in the way of surprise: even the big twist is a callback to the genre's foundation. Director Dominic Nutter (whose current only other film is, what do you know, a CGI dinosaur movie) only has so many tools (and angles of the CGI shark), and the script by Matthew B.C. and Dominic Ellis seems to know its own limits.  

High Points

Folks, it's a Saw ripoff with a shark. If you needed more out of life, I'm left wondering if we're actually the same species

Low Points

You do get the sense that the cast has something more to offer than just scream, but the script just doesn't seem to have time to care to find out

Lessons Learned

We learned from Jaws: The Revenge that sharks can scream, and now Blood In the Water tells us they also-

Rent/Bury/Buy

Look, I'm not here to tell you that Blood In the Water is better than average or not, you know, a straight-to-streaming CGI-heavy horror without much in the way of a point. BUT IT'S A SAW MOVIE THAT ISN'T A SAW MOVIE WITH A SHARK. I don't know what you're not getting about this. 

Tooth, Nail, & Torture

 Remember that post-Saw era of straight-to-what-we-used-to-call-DVDs horror, where titles were one homophone and cover art usually included teeth? 

Found another one!

Quick Plot: After a pre-credit sequence involving a man being skinned alive on a doctor's table, we move on to the tried and true "attractive college students wearing unreasonable clothing while camping" sequence to establish our hot young leads: Nice guy Nick and his secretly pregnant girlfriend Tayler, and slightly wilder Kai and her straight-laced boyfriend Tony. 

While stopping for gas, they meet Diane (Passions' Sheridan Crane/Face/Off host McKenzie Westmore), a lady on the town who needs a lift to her own car parked in the middle of nowhere because obviously, that's the ideal spot to gas a truckload of young people and lock them in a Saw 2-style grunge-filled home.

The group awakens alongside a few other confused souls, all with devices installed in the back of their heads and a large monitor and 22 hour countdown clock in full view. A video tape of a mysterious scientist plays informing them of their new purpose: raise their hormone levels sufficiently for their captors to collect their juices (just go with it) and they'll all be released. The best way of hitting those levels? TORTURE.

(Well, actually, as the Jeff Spicoli-ish lone wolf points out, they could all just have sex, but that would put this in a different genre, so forget we even brought it up.)

After a few false starts, the group agrees to rotate torture duty, trusting that when they hit their marks, the doors will open and they'll limp back home, a few fingers short but fully intact to live the rest of their lives.

These people are idiots.

Vile is credited as being directed by Taylor Sheridan, the now-successful writer behind Sicario and Hell or High Water, though his Wikipedia page tries to downplay any involvement. As first films go, Vile isn't terrible, though keep in mind, I'm saying this as someone who's seen just about every Saw-inspired gross-out flick to come out of the early aughts. Next to, say, Nine Dead, how can ANYTHING be bad?

But also, Vile is not very good. Part of it is the sheer datedness and stupidity of its concept: torture porn was a term that was often misused by mainstream critics, but Vile is LITERALLY about torture, and in a supremely dumb way at that. When a character is madly scrambling through kitchen drawers so that she can plug in a wafflemaker and burn her own back, there's really no other description that fits. 

All the soulful indie rock tunes used to montage sequences of a bound hot person screaming while his or her friends look on in tears can't cover the fact that, you know, this isn't cool or scary...it's just pretty stupid. 

High Points

As much as the young and pretty cast leaves little impression, I did appreciate the earnest effort to make it clear that the moral compasses of each person varied wildly, and that Nick was pleasantly consistent in his sense of right and wrong

Low Points

I don't always mind not getting answers in a genre film, but the half-story of Vile's watchers is so muddled that it's just genuinely unsatisfying to learn some, not all the answers we might have wanted. 

Lessons Learned
Even amongst college women, there is a fair amount of confusion over the definition of feminist

When your clock to a violent death is audibly clicking, you should definitely take all the time in the world to artistically determine the order of who gets tortured first

It ain't real torture until the fingernails come off

Rent/Bury/Buy

No, Vile is not particularly good, but it's better assembled than many a similar film of its era and subgenre. Those of you weirdo completists who feel the need to see every somewhat professionally made horror film of the last 20 years can find it on Amazon Prime.