Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Five Across the Eyes (movie #18)

This movie was disgusting. And I mean DISGUSTING. It turned my stomach, and I've seen a lot of horror movies so that's hard to do. The movie starts out rough,as in "hey, this looks like it was shot in my mom's van" rough. Five young girls are driving home from a high-school football game when they decide to take a shortcut (Oh fuck, don't you ever watch horror movies? Bad move!) and they end up down a seemingly deserted road and have no idea where they are.

The camerawork is shaky and the atmosphere is so obviously low-budget that I had a hard time warming up to this movie (I didn't want to spend two hours watching crap). The banter among the five girls is what finally won me over, because they really do sound like five girlfriends talking to each other. In too many of these low-budget horror movies the characters sound like they're reading lines (yes, I know they ARE reciting lines, but they're not SUPPOSED to sound like that, they're SUPPOSED to sound like they actually are the characters they're playing, and if they can't do that, they have no business being in a movie, even a low-budget one) but these girls make their friendship believable, and that endeared me to them,which helps, because some pretty horrible things are about to happen to them.

The reviews plastered all over this DVD case scream that the movie "demands to be seen" and that it's "shocking" and good, and some of the reviews quoted are from reputable sources, so I was intrigued to see what trouble fives teenage girls in a van could get into that would be horrible enough to freak out the people from Fangoria (one of the most well-known horror magazines). Hoo boy, I sure as hell didn't expect this. I seriously didn't know that a movie could gross me out like this. These poor girls are put through so much nasty,icky shit that I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle the killer myself. Not only that, but these girls get pretty resourceful. Rather than simply making the same "dumb bimbo"moves over and over again, they manage to find ways to evade the killer and attempt to escape, and they keep fighting even after they are broken and bloody and pieces of them are missing. I admire that.

I don't want to give anything about this movie away, as some of what happened surprised me because the back of the DVD case made this movie sound totally different than what it was. Suffice it to say this isn't the same old "rack them up and torture them and watch them die" fare that's become so common in horror movies these days. This movie is genuinely creepy (the sound of a honking horn will probably make me cringe for awhile after watching this movie) and the gore is stomach-churning and effective. This is definitely a movie to check out.

Cringe-inducing line of the day: "The taste of blood and the taste of teeth is nothing compared to the taste of her."

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