The Killing Grounds

This was actually not a bad movie.

I mean, it was not great or anything, but it was still pretty good.

The funny part is, is that both Anthony Michael Hall(16 Candles. The Breakfast Club. Weird Science) and Courtney Gains(Can't Buy Me Love) were always playing the parts of dorks when they were teenagers, but now they play the parts of a bunch of crazy killers in this. A true "Revenge Of The Nerds" movie. :-)

The film appears at its beginning to be a hack potboiler, but as the action proceeds, the intelligence of the script pokes through, and the viewer gets hooked. The cast is uniformly good, and few of the characters are unidimensional. There is a little bit of a problem with a deus ex machina device at the end, but overall I would give the writer and director pretty high marks. This is certainly worth renting or watching on cable.

"The Killing Grounds" has to be one of the few movies where you will dislike every single character. Fortunately, unlike some movies...like the awful "Skin Deep," you aren't supposed to like them.

A group of criminals steal a huge load of gold bars and plan on flying it over the US-Mexican border. Two of them are undercover cops, and they plan on cheating the others by keeping the gold after one of them flies it over the border. The plane crashes in the woods of the American Southwest, killing open of the cops and the plane's pilot.

Overall, the beginning of "The Killing Grounds" could have been better, and that could have made it into an exceptional movie instead of a mediocre one. Still, it wouldn't be a waste of your time to see this movie, since there are so many other movies like it out there that are really bad. Zanatos' score: ### out of ##### (or a 6 on this site's scale). Check it out.