Director: Erica Summers
Year: 2013
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural Slasher
Plot:
Tired of being humiliated, a bullied and harassed teen, inadvertently caught in the haze of a group of bullies, is pushed too far by one of their hazing pranks and is forced to use a special hoodoo-summoned killer who strikes out at the group for their past actions against him.
Review:
This was a fairly predictable and unremarkable genre effort. Among the film’s few positives is the way it provides the necessary setup for the kind of rampage to come, which is wholly justified in nearly every regard. The first half builds up the kind of background information on the relationship between him and the group of friends, which includes years of bullying, tormenting, and countless comments criticizing his looks and behavioral tics that have drawn their attention to him in the first place, setting the stage for their eventual physical bullying later on. At the same time, all of this is quite expected and formulaic about how the group targets and picks on someone, the constant personalized and relentless bullying makes the need for sympathy-fueled vengeance against the group, which comes in the form of a series of intriguing attacks that are unleashed on them as they’re taken out one by one in brutal attacks.
With these attacks offering up the kind of cheesy and wholly appropriate finale, there’s still the sake of this going through every single trope in this style, where a group of malignant and vicious individuals is so intent on bullying and brutalizing a kid for just being slightly different that it hardly manages any kind of originality in the whole. Not only are the group inherently unlikable and just plain cruel to the guy for just being slightly odd, but they do so by playing through the entirety of the jocks-bullying-nerds playbook with how they treat him and how those in the group who are forced to go along with their treatment of him so that they can feel better about bullying him, leaving everything to be quite predictable in how it all plays out. When added together with the way it lets the obvious low-budget limitations play out in its kills and effects, these all manage to bring this one down overall.
Overview: **.5/5
A watchable if overall unspectacular genre effort, this one doesn’t really do much to stand out from the crowd of numerous other genre fare while also managing not to be completely worthless. The most undeserving viewers who are fine with the issues here and appreciate this kind of genre fare will have the most to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.
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