The last movie of the fest was also the most difficult. See, I was winding down on juice for perhaps obvious reasons, and it was a British movie full of British people with quasi-comprehensible British accents. Still, I made a game attempt at it, and here is what you get. The Reeds documents a boatful of couples on weekend holiday who get lost in some, well, reeds. If it were not for the medical emergency and the hunter-or-hunters of unknown, mysterious, and possibly ghostly persuasion killing them off, this would probably not have been such a big deal. But, you know. These things happen.

Okay, with only two movies left, I’m caught up again. It is convenient that after burning through several movies in a row, the most recent one is also the one I’ve liked best today. Playing on the fears (and in some cases, almost certainly the fantasies) of a post-Columbine public, The Final presents a group of high school misfits led by the President of Holden Caulfield’s fan club who hatch a plot to get all of their tormentors together at a weekend party for a series of deadly lessons on the nature of being pushed too far.

Other than a subplot about a racist Vietnam vet, pretty much every character in every scene is filled with pathos and well-presented anger in equal measure, by the end of the movie if not in any given scene. There are a few good guys, but nearly everyone is a bad guy at some time or another, and that part of high school doesn’t show up on the screen very often. Still, the plot was mostly predictable once all the characters were set in motion by the middle third of the movie; the real joy here was the acting. I may or may not have liked Kill Theory better, but this is certainly the only one so far I’d recommend to anyone else.

Question: what do you get if you combine the most egregious misuse of Tony Todd in the past decade with a supernatural slasher flick and lead characters whose best talents are contained in their tank tops?[1][2] Answer: The Graves.

[1] I feel like I should have had more to say about the movie, but, well. I mean, it was only so good for making fun of in the first place, and I don’t have a good way to express that part here.
[2] That sounds terrible, perhaps? If it had been only slightly less true, I would have been able to keep myself from saying it. But, yeah, wow. On the bright side, part of the issue is that the tank tops did in fact hold treasures. (My good friend Jez wishes to add an additional drunken / unfortunately true declaration: “Her boobs look better with a shirt on.”)

I have surely mentioned, at some point, that I missed one of the Horrorfests due to a proximity failure caused by its gradually shrinking sphere of influence. But I’ve finally found a way to correct that oversight, via a cleverly scheduled weekend of DVD watching. Not quite the same as a theatrical experience, sure, but quite a bit cheaper and probably more comfortable overall. And the first film of the festival did not disappoint!

Kill Theory starts off with one of the standard tropes of the slasher genre, a van full of teens on their way to, well, it doesn’t really matter where they’re going, does it? It only matters that the place will be high on dangerous empty spaces and short on other people. And the teens all have trope personalities, to boot. There’s the annoying fat kid who is single when everyone around him is paired off[1], there’s the girl who takes off her shirt, thus ensuring a first reel murder scene, there’s the couple who are having problems because neither of them brought everything to the table when they decided to pair off, and that fighting inevitably spills into everyone else’s good weekend. Well, I suppose the guy who came to make them all dead also affects the weekend’s mood?

That guy? Instead of just killing everyone, which would have been more than enough to satisfy me after the fifth horrorfest’s mostly lackluster series of plots, he actually improves on the entire concept of slashing a vanful of teens. See, he was a rock climber who had to cut the belaying line and watch his friends plummet to their doom, because the alternative was for him to die along with them. And now he needs to prove to his therapist and/or himself that he’s not an aberration, by getting these teens to kill each other to save the one of them who will remain; if not, he’ll just kill them all. So, on top of being the perfect palate cleanser to the weekend, it actually managed to provoke thoughts about morality in its absolute and situational forms, and you can’t ask for a whole lot more than that from any film in any genre.

[1] He’s neither in a wheelchair not even half as annoying as the guy in Chainsaw who created that particular trope. But nobody else ever should be, as some molds can’t be matched.