That's a Wrap

As a fan of all of Marcel Walz' films to date, and a massive fan of Italian "Giallo" film in particular, I was anxiously looking forward to his newest film, "That's a Wrap", and it definitely did not disappoint! Full of sly in-jokes to the Hollywood behind the scenes process, subtle jabs at current culture, and of course a loving homage to Giallo and Dario Argento films in particular, this film is a real treat! Featuring the always fabulous Sarah French, along with a number of modern indie-horror folks and 90's late-nite stars and even a Tom Savini cameo, along with some clever kills and a cool killer-design, this movie should not be Missed!

Seems to be a lot of overly positive reviews for this movie early on, i'm guessing it's probably by the cast and crew trying to pad the ratings here. I get what the Director was going for with the lighting, but when every single scene is lit with the same colors, it starts to lose it's effectiveness very quickly. There were a couple decent kills, and there is no shortage of nudity. Those two things alone will more than satisfy a section of the horror fan community, but those looking for a coherent story...need to look elsewhere.

That brings me to the acting. Not terrible, but no real standouts here, maybe Sarah French. Sarah has been at this a long time and seems to be stuck in a rut of ultra low budget movies, that's not necessarily a bad thing...just expected her to break through to more mainstream movies by now.

Overall this is passable for a background movie while you clean the kitchen maybe.

Oh yeah, that open was about 7 or 8 mins too long.

Starts off OK with some interesting directing and a hot voluptuous older woman.

But within a few minutes the movie crumbles into a silly disarray of stupidity.

Makes sense with all the ridiculous reviews comparing this in a lemming way to Argento. I've personally never liked Argento (I know a lot of people claim to like him) but this movie is nothing like his films.

At least those have style and substance.

Nothing makes sense in this movie. Beginning with the security guard who points his flashlight at the woman but it's not even on.

The music track sucks too.

It's just quite a badly made movie with third rate actors and gimmicky directing that will bore you to death.

This production right here looks a little cheap to be honest, thus I do not believe it had much of a budget. Considering the kill shots, it definitely tried to rely more on creativity, but sadly they went with the shaky camera.

Now it does look like That's a Wrap decided to make fun of the slasher genre, forgetting that Scream made an entire franchise that is still going strong even today, with this exact theme. So if you don't have the budget, if you are not coming off as original, why choose this path?

Anyway, Scream was fun, complex and unpredictable. This one has close to no plot, you can describe it in one sentence, but that would mean spoiling it.

Anyway it's just about a killer with a mask, killing people, while sometimes remembering that it wants to spoof the genre.

All in all, bad dialogue, bad characters, weak acting, no development of whatsover, just scene after scene with a new weak kill.

I won't recommend it sadly, it fails as a horror comedy or plain slasher.

Cheers!

At the time of this review, this movie is sitting at a 6.4 user rating. I don't get it. I found it to be really pretentious and clunky. The acting is awful, the effects are trash. I can see the influence that some classic giallo films had on the director, but the execution was poor. There are several scenes of overt, graphic sexuality, that I found to be way too much. Trust me, I'm no prude, but this was WAY over the top and none of it was of any necessity to the story. All in all I was very disappointed with this film. I thought the trailer looked pretty good and I had high hopes. I definitely wouldn't recommend it.