A Horrible Way to Die

A Horrible Way to Die was in a 3 DVD movie box presented by Night Vision. I bought two of these boxes months ago, and I started the Psycho Killers box.

The name paints a totally different picture of the film than what it truly is. Most of the actually deaths in this movie don't seem that horrible when you only see some mild gore here and there. Yes, a horror movie doesn't necessarily need that much gore, but when a movie has a title like this, you're expecting that. Also A Horrible Way To Die is a very straight-forward title, but the movie is far from it. The movie is quite short yet it's very slow. It takes too long for anything to happen, which makes it seem more like a seriously boring art drama.

The "seriously boring art drama" feel was also enhanced by the way this film was shot. While it enhanced the creepy, haunting atmosphere, it also annoyed the hell out of me. That kind of shaky shots are good every once in a while, but not all through the movie. It's not easy to look at, and therefore not easy to follow. It wasn't just the visual side that was hard to follow. Of course I don't believe in chronological narrative anymore, because breaking the story with flashbacks work most of the time, but in A Horrible Way to Die it was sometimes really hard to tell when something happened. Of course this was enhanced by the cinematography, because you can't always see the characters and what they look like, and then realise when that scene took place and all that.

The writing of this film is good though. The dialogue is as amazing as it tends to be in horror movies, it's so real. The story itself is not bad, apart from the story being so slow. The good writing can be seen in little things, like amazing twist, dialogue and whatnot. The slowness itself is not a sign of bad writing in general, but when you watch a horror movie it's frustrating when everything happens at the last minute. But the story might work well as a novel.

A Horrible Way to Die is an interesting movie to say the least. While it's not actually good and I didn't enjoy watching it, it definitely stands out from the horror movies I've watched.

Other than knowing a brief plot outline of an escaped murderer on the hunt of his ex-girlfriend, I had no idea what I was getting into when going to see Adam Wingard's latest, A Horrible Way To Die. Just so you're aware, as far as plot goes, that is all you have to know before heading off to see this film. As for an overall visceral pleasing experience… well, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As long as the beholder isn't epileptic or easily prone to motion sickness, that is. Both of which I am not, enabling me to absolutely love this film.

Constant shots of close-ups and not just on the actors' faces but knuckles, waists and other body parts (get your mind out of the gutter) as well as random objects around them effectively brought me into the characters' personal space with an intimacy most other mainstream films lack. Never is the camera shaky either, it's more of a purposeful fluidity, like imitating the human eye as it occasionally wanders while in conversation with another person. A good example of a film to compare the camera movement to would be Gaspar Noe's Irreversible. I don't me to drone on and on about one technical aspect of the film, but when something even the most casual moviegoers can not ignore is applied in such a non-gimicky way it's praise can not go unnoticed.

So, now that my praise for the way in which the film was shot has gone on the record I'll briefly dive into other elements of the film, mainly acting, plot and score:

Acting - The two stars of the film, Aj Bowen and Amy Seimetz, both turn in a-list performances. Can't wait to see these two make the leap into Hollywood and gain the larger attention that they both deserve. Plot – Keeping the story simple and absent of any convoluted sub-plots might be too dull for some to sit through… sucks for those people. Personally, I was ready for it to be an hour longer. Score – Nothing too extraordinary here, but it works for what it's trying to accomplish. Overall I'd say A Horrible Way To Die is a great way to spend 85 minutes

A guy has a kidnapped girl in his trunk. He drives out somewhere during winter and chokes her to death. A girl assists an AA meeting. Another of the attendees introduced himself to her and slowly they begin a relationship although she's traumatized and repressed. How these two stories relate we come to find out in flashbacks as this movie progresses.

Turns out that the killer is a convicted serial killer who managed to escape while being transported somewhere. He steals cars and as the manhunt intensifies and his face is plastered all over the news, he threatens people to drive him across state lines.

The couple becomes intimate and she reveals her secret to the guy. She was the serial killer's girlfriend. She called the police on him after she followed him and discovered he had rented a storage unit to keep the bodies. But there is a twist in the relationship between her and the new guy.

A Horrible Way to Die is a good title for a horror movie, except that it doesn't have anything to do with this movie. The idea comes up somewhere when the killer asks his gf how she would like to die. But that's about it. We don't see any horrible killings. There is some after-the-fact gore, but nothing special. It's a small budget movie that doesn't look or sound like it is. Wingard knows how direct and he knows hot to tell a story. And this movie looks very nice and sophisticated. Wingard has to employ a variety of tricks to overcome the main problem- the short script. So we get a lot of different and strange camera techniques that may seem out of place but that give this film its unique tone and atmosphere. We get moving but not shaky camera, out of focus, odd placement of the camera, things in the way. And almost all of it works, except for the distracting Christmas lights that the girl for some reason has everywhere in her house. The story works, even the way it's told, the surprise. The actors all do a good job, in particular Seimetz. And the film transmits the closeness and intimacy of the characters. It's just not enough- not enough horror, not enough violence, not enough gore- after all this movie involves a serial killer.

Well, the title ain't lying. Lots of people die in this movie, either on screen or off, and one person comes very close to dying, and all of the methods used are pretty horrible.

"A Horrible Way to Die" brings an admittedly unique spin to the serial killer movie. It uses mixed up chronology to tell the story of a woman whose boyfriend, a convicted serial killer, escapes from prison and comes back to find her, and the efforts of a new love interest to help her and keep her safe. The wacky order in which the story is told makes it feel richer than it probably is, and there are some major plot twists toward the end (up there with some of the biggest) that are handled less than delicately (you can practically hear the gears grinding at one point as the movie shifts into an entirely new direction). And stylistically it feels like a film made by a film student who's been itching to get his hands on a camera and can't control himself once he has -- the camera is always, I mean ALWAYS, moving, randomly zooming, drifting off to the edges of the frame, going out of focus. It's exceedingly annoying.

But the film does have a morbidly grim appeal to it. I can't say I necessarily enjoyed watching it, but I can say that it was memorable.

Grade: B-

Billing itself as a realistic portrayal of insanity in the mind of a serial killer, I was left bitterly disappointed.

Expecting something like "Tony : London Serial Killer" what I got was a very disappointing and shallow look at a movie that wants to be more than it is.

There are many problems. One of them being the irritating way that the film has been shot. Being a very shaky cam, at first I liked it and appreciated it for being different and gave it realism, but after a while it began to become a distraction. Deliberate out of focus shots were also contributing to the irritating value that the movie was rapidly growing.

The fact is, you never feel like you are getting into the mind of this killer. You simply feel as though you are following him. Neither investing time in anything he is doing. You know he is a bad guy because he kills people, but any depth to this killer as a person, is non existent.

The acting was fine and there were some genuine decent moments, but the film wants realism, and the biggest killer to the realism is in the ending. I am not going to spoil it, but I thought "no way, this is basic horror movie stuff". I thought that it was a cheap way to end what was a film that was lacking the positives that made films like "Henry" and "Tony" the films that they are in the Serial Killer sub genre.

If you want a good serial killer movie, check out the films I just mentioned. You could probably give this one a miss!