Terror Abaixo de Zero

Below Zero is geared for those who are 16 and older. This film is OK for background for a teen party, teen get-together for something other than to concentrate on a movie. Just noise. I found the movie dull and boring. In order to keep it on, I had to do other things while watching Below Zero. No popcorn popper here. The story is dull. I suppose the actors try their best, but cannot save a bad movie. The sets are dull and boring.It is not as bad as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but it is not that far away. Below Zero is a very low budget movie. Whatever money is/was received at the box office should amount to pure profit since not much money was poured into the making of this film. I give this movie two thumbs up, which may be one too many, but I felt generous remembering Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes.

Saying this film is god awful in every possible way, would be putting it nicely. This is one of the worst lumps of crap I have ever seen, randomly threw it on while looking through Netflix (and I'm in Canada, Canadian Content Laws guarantee tons of garbage content, this is worse than the Don Cherry movies). This movie was not suspenseful, it was not thrilling, it is a horror by attempt, which it fails miserably at. It actually becomes angering when this movie tries to mimic scenes from The Shining or Misery, the only way this film could've been made, is if the screenwriter produced the film herself (which she partially did). All of the actors stunk, the sound mix was garbage, the directing wasn't the worst or causation for this debacle. Do not watch this film, watch anything but this film, if you want to watch a terrible movie find HardRock Zombies, if you want a good movie, go elsewhere.

BELOW ZERO is a thinking person's mystery horror. A scriptwriter, Jack the Hack, has writer's block and arranges to be locked in a slaughterhouse freezer until he comes up with a script. Believe it or not, scriptwriter Signe Olynyk tells me she also did this when writing the movie. On screen, the story is dramatised for us as Jack writes, so we have two on-screen narratives: Jack's world (think, Fargo) and that of the alter ego in his story (think Saw). As he considers various re-writes, the story within a story changes. But a third story is at hand: that from Jack's own psyche. His basic plot, surprise surprise, is someone accidentally being locked in a freezer, in a building owned by a serial killer. But, if you can stand back from the subsequent on screen gore, there's maybe time to work out what's really happening! This Kaufmanesque horror story keeps you on your toes all the way through. Signe doesn't recommend new writers try the freezer trick at home, but she does run a scriptwriters' workshop, Pitchfest (www.pitchfest.com), and invites any budding writers reading this to get in touch with her.

The basic premise of the movie is that of a horror story writer seeking some inspiration for writing his latest story, by going to a rural farm where he'll have some peace and quiet, and a prearranged eerie atmosphere given that he'll stay inside the farm's slaughterhouse. As he'll soon find out, he got more than he bargained for. Nothing too original about the storyline, but it's always a good starting point for a horror movie.

The problem was that the story didn't develop in a coherent way and many of the subsequent twists and turns in the plot seemed both trivial and unnecessary. There was no real moment of horror nor was there any eerie atmosphere throughout the movie. Many horror movies get away with bad scripts thanks to good directing, where a build-up of atmosphere and the occasional horror moment draw you into the story and make you forget about any plot holes or incoherence.

The problem here was that there was no real atmosphere. Partly, this was due to bad character casting. Miss "piggy laugh" was way too young and ordinary-looking for her role as some redneck farm lady, and the main character seemed more like a bored heavy metal-loving teenager than a professional horror writer fighting his inner daemons. Even so, the director could have saved the day with some "camera magic", adding a few extra flashback moments here and there and backing up the dialogs with fitting background music, just to get some atmosphere going. That's what separates good directors from bad, good directors don't just follow the script as a textbook manual and leave it up to the actors to make or break the movie, especially not when it's plain obvious that the main actors are unable to carry out their parts properly.

The only thing going for this movie, worth at most 3 stars, is the cute and versatile actress Kristin Booth. The rest of the horror is a patchwork of scenes from every slasher film you've ever seen mixed with every evil kid film you've ever seen. The concept was original, but the execution, pardon the pun, was disastrous.