Green River

This is a movie that I watched due to it being in a compilation pack that I won from a podcast. I've had this in my possession for a few years and decided to watch it. That pack by the way is called 8 Midnight Horror Movies - Hatchets & Cleavers. This is also another one that I don't necessarily think is a horror movie from this pack. It does go dark enough in the third act for me to include it here. However, it doesn't feature hatchets or cleavers.

Synopsis: haunted by her sister's mysterious disappearance years ago at Green River, Charisma Kavanagh (Danielle Franke) returns to silence her ghosts and make peace with the past.

We start this movie seeing a convertible driving along a road. There are deep woods on either side. Driving is Allison Chase (Kristina Hughes). With her is Charisma. They are heading up to a cabin that belonged to Charisma's family. They stopped off to get gas. It is there that Allison learns there are a high number of missing persons in the area. We also see that she has a moment where she zones out. She takes a pill to help ground her.

Outside with the car, Charisma realizes she knows the guy pumping the gas. His name is Charlie (Robert N. Lee) and he dated Charisma's sister when they were younger. Allison gets jealous and causes them to leave. I wondered at this point if they were dating or just friends.

Our couple then goes to a diner for food. They order salads, but what they get isn't what they were expecting. They pay and leave but get nervous as a man does as well. He drives a pick-up truck. This guy is also heading the same way they are. There is then an odd standoff as Charisma doesn't tell her to turn, causing Allison to turn around. This occurs when the pick-up is stopped, allowing Allison to go. The problem is that it is violating the laws of the road and the truck should go first. To put an end to this, Allison proceeds.

They settle in and head to bed. Their car alarm kept going off that night. Charisma tells Allison to just turn it off, but being that she is from the city, she refuses. She wants to know if someone messes with it as it is a long trip back to town. The problem is that the next morning, her battery is dead. The truck pulls up to the house and this causes the women to hide. They decide to steal his truck to head for help. This is just the start of the nightmare.

That is about the extent of what I wanted to give for my recap of the story as well as to introduce our characters. Before delving deeper, I did want to preface that this is a low-budget movie. I want to commend everyone involved here for making this. That is more than I can say. With that taken care, I think this has some good things going for it, but where they decided to go didn't work for me. Part of the problem that I can see is that there are so many writers on this project. I'm wondering if there were too many ideas introduced and pieces were chopped to fit things together that don't necessarily fit.

The first thing I should go over would be the crux of this movie. Charisma's sister disappeared a while ago. Allison and she are going to a family cabin. I'm guessing to clear their heads as well as to help her get over it. We see there are a bunch of missing people posters. All of them women. I'm almost guessing that they borrowed from the 'Green River Killer'. The only part of this that gets factored into the movie later is that Jack Walker (Bruce Peterson), who is the guy who left the diner and drove the pick-up, is accused of being the reason for all the disappearances. I think there's an interesting idea here. It is one we've seen before though. Where this goes in the third act was something I wasn't expecting and they could have leaned into that more.

I think I'll shift over to talking about our three leads. Allison is an interesting character in that we know she has a condition. She has pills to keep it in check. We never learn what it is though. There is a moment where she loses her pills. My issue there is that she never checks for them before leaving the cabin. Charisma finds them, but it is too late. The other problem there is that it wouldn't happen that fast, whatever the ailment is. I don't have much to say about Charisma outside she is the reason they are coming here. The only fleshing out we get of her is that her sister is missing. She and Allison also bicker constantly which made me dislike them both. Jack on the other hand is someone that give back-story to and that's it. We know that he is a veteran when he is looking at nature and hears things from the war. That also goes nowhere which was frustrating for me.

Since I've talked about the characters, let me go the acting. I'm not going to be too hard since they're all amateurs. I've already said that I can't stand Hughes and Franke's interactions. All they do is fight and bicker. They try to make Allison's character more interesting, but it comes off a bit flat. She does play crazy well enough; I will give her that. I did like Peterson in his role. None of them are given a lot to work with so I am factoring that in. The rest of the cast is fine. They're locals, friends and family. They were used in the best way which I can appreciate.

The last things to go into would deal with filmmaking. I'd say that the cinematography is fine. They don't do anything too out of the normal with it. The nature shots we got look good though. I will credit that. It does give that feeling of being stranded from town. There's not a lot in the way of effects. I did see a slip-up with a computer effect where instead of a flash from a gun, it said 'media'. That made me chuckle. Other than that, I did notice an issue with mixing as there was wind during a scene in the car. This is just another aspect that doesn't help. The soundtrack other than that was fine.

In conclusion, I wasn't a big fan of this movie. I think there was some interesting things that they could work with but didn't. It could be 'too many cooks in the kitchen'. This was filmed in Montana and that made it look great. It also makes it feel isolated, which is good. This is boring though, which isn't good for a film with a 90-minute runtime. The acting was amateurish, unfortunately to say. There just isn't a lot positive I can say outside of that.

My Rating: 3.5 out of 10.

This has to be the worst movie ever. Are the two main characters retarded or something. I thought this entire movie was a joke. How could two people be so stupid? The writers make women out to be helpless retards. I was hoping after stealing the poor guys truck he would shoot the two main characters dead and the movie would be over. I mean, who funded this project? And who uses a remote control car lock on a convertible? The one who keeps popping Xanex is an idiot. The cell phone works in the river talking to mom, but not at the house. Between laughing and frustration in watching this movie. I have little faith in humanity and the movie business after watching this piece of crap. Anyone involved with the production of this movie should take a long hard look at their life's goals.

I opened my account at IMDb just to be able to post that this movie is the worst "shirt" ever made. Most of you must be aware Im using the word "shirt" to avoid censorship. Just remove the extra "r" PLEASE Don't WATCH THIS MOVIE...unless you want to torture yourself and spend part of you life when you could have been doing something else, like sleep or take a bath or have a picture of you own ass and watch it instead of this movie... anything else is more productive that watching this piece of "shirt". The worst thing is that i rented the movie and forgot to return it on date, and now have to pay Blockbuster a fine... Now I realized i have to write at least ten lines for the review, so I must say that Every single copy of this movie should be collected and burned for the sake of humanity. The director should have keep doing electrical works instead of trying to make movies. I must have a big sin to pay, thats why I choose this movie. Now Im paying all my debts with God. Please forgive all my bad actions, but don't ever let me watch this kind of movie again. Many years ago I watched "The Mosquito Coast" I thought it was a bad movie... how wrong I was,,, didn't knew that human minds can produce things like Green River..human can always get worse.

thanks

I hate badmouthing a movie, especially if it's obvious that whoever made it didn't have a lot of money to work with. But whoever made this movie, apparently had the means to get two misleading reviews posted here, and as a result I just watched this garbage, so I'm really annoyed.

At first I gave it the benefit of doubt and assumed the acting was intentionally weird, as opposed to awful. After about half an hour, I started fast-forwarding, because it was so boring. When I slowed down to see the "powerful scenes alone in the cabin", I was left speechless. What a waste of my time.

On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being Spielberg and 1 being a monkey throwing feces) I gladly rate this movie lower than 1. I collect low budget indie movies and can sit through pretty much anything, and every single time I think I've seen the worst, another comes along that tops it (or bottoms it in this case). No plot spoiling here because there is no plot. What you do have is 2 actresses who thought it would be a good idea to cut their teeth in the B movie world before moving onto bigger and better things. Only problem is, bigger and better for these two will mean working at an In-N-Out Burger joint for the rest of their lives because acting is now out of the question. In fact, I demand they reimburse me the 4 bucks I wasted on this movie..if you could call it that. I call it BS !!