Mal e Violência

I've been wanting to check this out since learning that it won Best Feature at the 2003 NYC Horror Film Festival. Now after watching it I'm guessing every other film it was competing against must've REALLY sucked.

Malevolence is in no way a bad film, yet it's just not that good either. The concept of mixing a robbery-gone-wrong story with a slasher film is pretty original, but this only makes it's heavy use of slasher clichés drag it down into mediocrity. What would be perfectly acceptable idiotic behavior from stupid teenagers in a fun slasher film, becomes unbearably frustrating because one would expect more from the unconventional characters portrayed here.

As the film stumbles forward through all the usual "scares" of the genre, I only became more and more frustrated by how a good idea is just thrown out the window in order to fall back on things that have been done to death (and much better) 25 years ago. All this is topped off by a soundtrack that was obviously intended to be "old-school" yet comes off as just really annoying and repetitive.

Still, as far as low-budget indie horror flicks go, Malevolence is decently shot, and while it does bring in a new mix to the formula, it immediately waters it down by simply not doing anything worth-while with it.