Alive or Dead
Written & Directed by Stephen Goetsch
Maria...Ann Henson
Sarah...Angelica May
Frank...L. Flint Esquerra
Hot young girlies always seem to suffer from bad luck in horror movies, don't they? Take, for instance, Maria. She's just trying to get home when her car loses two tires simultanouesly, late at night and in the middle of nowhere. She doesn't have the necesary number of spares, and her cellphone charger isn't functioning (possibly because it was inside her vagina only moments before--seriously!). Since there's little else that she can do, Maria decides to investigate the old school bus that has been abandoned nearby. You know, the one that somebody has written "HELP ME" on in what appears to be blood.
Inside the Bad News Bus, Maria finds evidence of a massacre, with only two survivors: one, an unconscious fat bastard in the Uncle Jesse Duke school of fat bastardism, and the other a young female bound and blindfolded. Before Maria can offer any real assistance, the madman who performed the dastardly deed returns, plops ass behind the wheel, and they're all off on a roadtrip to hell.
Or a castle in the middle of the desert. Whichever comes first.
Once escaped from the killer, rather than get the hell out of there, they opt instead to explore his house. Which pretty much means that they deserve every last thing that they have coming to them--and come it will, because there's more than one maniac in this household.
Is it too much to ask that characters in a horror film act believable? I mean, at one point, Maria suggests the dumbest thing that I have ever heard someone suggest when attempting an escape: "Come on. Let's go check out the roof." Although, to be honest, that's tied with another of her verbal gems: "You wanna go clubbing after this?"
Slow, dull, and almost unintelligible, this steaming celluloid poop pile only gets points for the bizarre opening and semi-decent finale. Everything in between was just a mess. There were countless "shocking" things unfolding on screen, but they failed to shock and in fact just barely broke up the monotony. The characters were flat and lifeless, with no believable motivation or discernable IQ. Thinking back, the best thing that I can say about this movie is that the acting could have been worse.
And that ain't saying much.
2008
Rated R
83 Minutes
Color
English
United States
"Yeah, I jiggled it. And then did the hokey pokey."
--J/Metro
