SEASON IN HELL (2004)

[The Burgomaster]

Here's another stinker from Mill Creek's TOMB OF TERRORS 50 Movie Pack.

Season in Hell?  Well, maybe not a full season, but certainly 66 minutes in hell for anyone who watches this movie.

I'm convinced there's an okay low-budget movie buried somewhere in this mess.  Unfortunately, the director decided to bombard his audience with just about every visual effect and editing technique you can imagine (solarization, black & white, shaky cam, extreme close ups, dissolves, fade outs, slow motion, fast motion, etc.)  This is very distracting and exhausting and makes the story (as thin as it is) very hard to follow.

Here's what I got out of it:

Two American guys trying to escape from terrorist attacks (???) head for the Canadian border.  They stop at a house at the edge of a forest and ask the owner (a weird hunter wearing a plaid jacket) for gas.  They end up spending the night and they encounter some women being held hostage in the basement.  There are also some evil / demon women (in the credits they are referred to as The Devil's Succubi or Satan's Succubi or something).  Every once in awhile, Satan himself flashes on the screen for a few seconds.  Some people get chopped with axes.  The hostage women make derogatory racial remarks and fight among themselves (I think this is supposed to be some sort of social commentary).  Whenever things start to get really dull, a topless woman pops onto the screen for a few seconds of gratuitous breast shots.  One of the actresses has some brief scenes wearing some sort of a goth / S&M thong and she has a cute bum.  But as I mentioned, all of this occurs in the midst of some overused visual effects and editing and it's pretty annoying.

Overall, an ambitious effort where the director just went too far trying to create an "art house" look.

Oh, and did I mention you should watch until the end of the credits?  (Nothing good happens, there's just a minute or two of additional footage after the credits).

[Jack]

I absolutely hate those movies where they seem to be playing with every button on the editing machine.  Like some sort of demo for the software rather than anything to do with movie making.  Ooh, let's give this scene a washed out, grainy look.  And then in the next scene, we'll fast-forward, and everything will be brown, except for this stuff, which will have a red glow effect.  Bah!

[Javakoala]

Burgomaster, you really should watch ROSE OF DEATH.  It isn't that it is good, but someone FINALLY had an idea of how to edit together a fairly normal movie.  The acting sucks and the story is old a dirt, but it would hook me with something every time I was ready to say, "Okay, I'm moving on."  If these people just had good actors and a good script, they might make a pretty good movie.

ROSE OF DEATH is on the same disk as SEASON IN HELL, LUNAR PACK and NIGHTMARE MUSEUM.