After the obligatory first-scene killing, we are tormented with an endlessly uneventful introduction to these cardboard B-movie college characters (who are so original that they require no more than 35 seconds each) that goes on for a whole half-hour: an eternity. In it, a wide-eyed mega-cliché horror-flick hobo warns the college kids of the impending danger. How come those street-bums always know so much? What is it about drinking booze all day and night, and sleeping under bridges that gives hobos such magical powers? When I find the time, I will one find a nice magic-wielding bridge and bring along a bottle of magic-inducing booze with me, and then perhaps I too might find myself in possession of supernatural powers.
TR's B-movie badness truly strikes once the action finally starts. Suddenly, the already cheesy dialog drops a few notches lower, from B-movie ineptness to D-movie sewerness, with characters saying very dumb and boring things indeed. The acting isn't much better either, but the script is the main culprit. As a result, TR is neither scary nor even mildly tense. The movie leaves you cold, as if watching a financial report on CNN.
Speaking of the letters of the alphabet and how they relate to under-funded (or in some ways "over-funded") useless horror films, the soundtrack is on a G-movie level; parts of it could have been used in a G-rated Disney flick. The make-up effects are on an K-movie level; the bloodied wounds look as fake as if they'd given a 6th-grader a bottle of ketchup and told him: "you're hired".
But at least the movie has the decency to warn us early on that no real terror awaits us: just check out those pathetic horror movies that the dorm kids watch early on. If they're anything to go by then we're in trouble, and so it turns out to be. If TR is an E-movie then the crap they're watching must be P-movie horror. Perhaps that's why they'd included them: to make TR look less crap by comparison. One scene involves a harmless-looking pudgy blond guy torturing an overweight woman; he is licking a ketchup wound on her thigh while sliding his blade across her face, in true horror-film psycho-on-the-loose doing-dull-and-predictable-things manner – but shot with a cheap camcorder. I have never seen two fat people involved in a sadist-and-victim scenario in any thriller, action, or horror film, so in a sense TR does have a note of originality. The other movie they watched was an N-movie horror film with a bored-looking middle-aged geezer chasing around some kids in the woods. The budget spent on those 2-3 scenes? Rough estimates are at $8. Thereabouts, give or take a penny.
TR's value as a so-bad-it's-good flick is low. There is only one unintentionally funny moment: when the dumb blond finds her boyfriend stuck in an elevator and accuses him of the murders. Naturally, the mysterious brunette (Amber) who accused him was the obvious suspect from the word go; who didn't see THAT transparent "plot-twist" coming?
The plot is an incomprehensible mess; many loose-ends and sub-plot dead-ends that cause all-out confusion. (Or perhaps I was too bored to pay attention.) It's almost as if there are three different stories/premises here: 1) the Satanic serial-killer who slays prostitutes, 2) the confused ghost offing college kids, and 3) the necrophiliac autopsy technician fiddling around with dead women. How these three plot-strings connect as a whole is beyond me. Let me take a wild guess
they don't. It's as if the director/writer/producer of TR (no, not Ed Wood's nephew) had planned to cram all his favourite horror clichés into one movie, sort of like "The Cabin in the Woods" but one million times weaker.
A woman goes to check up on the corpse of her sister (who died in a brutal Satanic ritual), and what does she see in the morgue? The doctor having sex with the corpse. The same doctor who has absolutely nothing to do with the Satanist! I mean, what are the odds? That's what I call overkill. I'm surprised the director/writer/producer (I am not using his name so as to avoid embarrassing him) didn't include a zombie-virus sub-plot too – seeing as how he'd covered pretty much most other horror sub-genres already.
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