Probably shouldn’t have chosen to be a Sober Soldier for this one
I do have a big soft spot for these shoelace-budget, filmed-on-a-potato, horror-adjacent, experimental-independent-performance-art movies.
Wasn’t as in love with this one as I hoped I’d be. I love a lot of shots and moments; some pretty effective effects too, all things considered.
The tone here is a lot of fun; parts of it feel like it’s documenting the Gainesville skate/punk scene in the 80’s. Lot of personality and a good sense of humor. The sporadic editing makes it clear it’s not quite reality. Loved the trippy sequences when that one dude with the long hair (which one, right?) ate the pills outside 7-Eleven.
If you run through the plot beats one-by-one, this is like a punk rock Dark Night of the Scarecrow, but this is in no way meant to be analyzed as a traditional horror slasher. But then… it also kind of is? Like that’s what the last stretch becomes. And it’s not really awesome at doing that. They’ve got the two people watching through the TV to keep it interesting thematically, and keep that unorthodox presentation of the early stuff. It just gets repetitive and once the style loses its novelty, it kinda lost me towards the end.
It suffers from all the things these types of “video” movies do; performances and audio are generally god awful but that’s also like, a big part of the charm. Might’ve just been the VHS transfer but I feel like I missed some vital lines.
I liked it though! You watch these kinds of movies for the vibes and the creative experimentation, and it delivers both, though there’s definitely slumps in the runtime. Some great punk tracks in here as well.
Probably shouldn’t have chosen to be a Sober Soldier for this one
I do have a big soft spot for these shoelace-budget, filmed-on-a-potato, horror-adjacent, experimental-independent-performance-art movies.
Wasn’t as in love with this one as I hoped I’d be. I love a lot of shots and moments; some pretty effective effects too, all things considered.
The tone here is a lot of fun; parts of it feel like it’s documenting the Gainesville skate/punk scene in the 80’s. Lot of personality and a good sense of humor. The sporadic editing makes it clear it’s not quite reality. Loved the trippy sequences when that one dude with the long hair (which one, right?) ate the pills outside 7-Eleven.
If you run through the plot beats one-by-one, this is like a punk rock Dark Night of the Scarecrow, but this is in no way meant to be analyzed as a traditional horror slasher. But then… it also kind of is? Like that’s what the last stretch becomes. And it’s not really awesome at doing that. They’ve got the two people watching through the TV to keep it interesting thematically, and keep that unorthodox presentation of the early stuff. It just gets repetitive and once the style loses its novelty, it kinda lost me towards the end.
It suffers from all the things these types of “video” movies do; performances and audio are generally god awful but that’s also like, a big part of the charm. Might’ve just been the VHS transfer but I feel like I missed some vital lines.
I liked it though! You watch these kinds of movies for the vibes and the creative experimentation, and it delivers both, though there’s definitely slumps in the runtime. Some great punk tracks in here as well.
