culwin

I put this on without knowing what it was or anything about it. One look at the runtime - 1:27:00, and I figured oh, it's going to be some low-budget Sci-Fi movie junk. And yeah, that's what it looks like the entire time. Sure, some stars you've heard of are in it, but that doesn't mean anything. A job's a job. Then pretty quickly came the closing credits: "A Francis Ford Coppola film" - my jaw dropped. Metaphorically.

It's like AI was told to write a David Lynch film and given a bunch of random elements to stitch together. A haunted clock tower. A biker kid named "Flamingo" (yeah). Vampires. Edgar Allen Poe. None of it makes much cohesive sense. There are definitely some entertaining bits (sometimes intentionally, other times not) here, but you have to wade through the cheesy dialogue, cheesy script, and cheesy special effects (yes that's a lot of cheese). If you're down to see a weird movie that is bad/good, then this might be for you. It's not good, but I'm glad I saw it.

Well it's better than the third one, but that's not saying much. You can tell from the start that at least this isn't going to be stupid convoluted nonsense (like Scream 3 was) but it really starts to drag in the middle. All the tropes are there, and at least there's a bit of a coherent plot. Unfortunately, it's just not very interesting. One of the rules of a good slasher movie is to have the right blend of scares, seriousness, and funny moments. But this isn't very scary and even the laughs are few. I guess I could recommend this if you've seen the other movies and you have nothing better to do.

There are some cool fight scenes as you might expect, even a couple moments with crazy magic powers, but unfortunately not really enough. In between, there's lots of talking and traveling around and whatnot. Sure, you need some of that to establish the plot, but it's too much and just not that interesting. There are times when there's nothing on camera but a bunch of trees. Even some of the "fights" are pretty boring - having some random group of fighters defeating some other random group of fighters in the bushes isn't that exciting. The choice of music for the score is also pretty odd sometimes - 70's easy listening instrumentals? Overall, it's alright, but cutting around 20 minutes out of this would have been an improvement.