Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
The setup is as timeless… or as tired... you choose the adjective, as it gets. A bunch of randy young and attractive adults load up in a van to drive out to some out of the way cabin to party and engage in premarital sex, and of course no one has any cell phone reception. Is there really anyplace you go in the United States of these here America’s where there’s no cell phone reception? Unless they all are using Metro PCS? And sure enough there’s a crazed killer out there somewhere in them there woods who means to do these kids some mighty bad harm. But not so fast my friends because things are a bit different in this story ‘Kill Theory’ as our lunatic has gone all ‘Battle Royale’ on us in his extreme efforts to prove a point.
Our film opens with a psychiatrist (Don McManus) talking to a patient (Kevin Gage) who he is about to unleash into society. Our patient is in the nut house because during one of those mountain climbing expeditions that certain people like to do, for whatever reason, something went terribly wrong leaving this cat and his three best friends dangling from the rope. The decision this dude was faced with, with the rope above him quickly fraying, was to cut those three dudes dangling beneath him loose and live or choose to die with his crew. Obviously we know the one he chose which has gotten locked up for being criminally insane. He’s all better now though. Except for the fact that he seems fidgety, angry, pissed off, resentful and hateful, but then I don’t have a degree in psychiatry so what the hell do I know. The only thing this crack psychiatrist wants this loon to do, once he is released, is visit him like twice a week for a year because Doc isn’t completely sold that my man is completely sincere in his regret for what he has done. Which only pisses off this obviously still crazy dude even more.
Now on to our children who will be dying soon. We have the host, rich kid and general asshole Brent (Teddy Dunn), his girl and resident whore Amber (Ryanne Duzich) whose twins are dying to be free from their liberal restraints, but alas it will not be in this movie. Tragic. We have the prerequisite minority in Carlos (Theo Rossi), his girl
Nicole (Steffi Wickens) who I tagged to be the ‘We All Gonna Die Guy’ in this movie, but I would be wrong on that one. We also have all around great guy Michael (Patrick Flueger), his lady and final girl material Jennifer (Agnes Bruckner) and finally the fat funny womanless guy who only tags along with these way cooler kids in the movie universe in Freddy (Daniel Franzese). He, as it turns out, was the ‘We All Gonna Die Guy’ in this flick and I’ll have you know in the history of ‘We All Gonna Die Guys’ this dude was in the top five for the most annoying ‘We All Gonna Die Guys’ ever. Once our kids get to the plush cabin, we get an uninvited guest in the asshole rich kids trashy step sister Alex (Taryn Manning).
So there’s some rudimentary banter, a gratuitous titty shot, though it’s not the titties we initially expected to see, and it’s not long before somebody’s dead. Now the game is afoot because that loon we talked about earlier has rigged everything in and around this place with no cell phone reception, and has instructed our kids that this particular evening they have three hours to live. Except for one that is, as this loon has basically instructed these kids to kill each other until there is a single survivor. If more than one lives they all die. Simple enough. Why he’s picking on these kids, well that’s another story but this loons theory is that when faced with the same circumstances that he was faced with, everyone would’ve made the same decision that he made.
Directed by Chris Moore of Project Greenlight fame I actually enjoyed ‘Kill Theory’ in the final analysis, but getting to that final analysis wasn’t all that easy. So the first thing that you’re going to have to muddle through is the amazingly generic characters that have been written for us as pretty much all of them are pulled right off your local horror-mart bargain rack. It’s probably gotten to the point in this genre that there is really nothing you can do with these horror movie characters, but it doesn’t look like a lotta effort was made here. Then when our kids start talking to each other it doesn’t get much better, and they don’t do a lot to help endear themselves to us or differentiate themselves from the same horny kids we saw in the thirty horror movies before we saw this one. And don’t get us started on this edition of ‘We All Gonna Die Guy’.
But I will say that once our kids start dying in earnest, ‘Kill Theory’ got infinitely more interesting. Some of the deaths were nicely staged and were pretty darned violent, there was the occasional shock here and there, and as our kids got whittled down the tension rose in relation to the numbers shortage.
As far as the acting goes I don’t know how much is required for an actor in slasher flick but these actors ran and screamed and died just as one would expect them to do, we only wished that they had killed off Daniel Franzese’s ‘We All Gonna Die Guy’ a little sooner. That is if he died at all because I’m not gonna spoil it for you.
So the setup of ‘Kill Theory’ is eerily similar to the new ‘Friday the 13th’ remake and with the basic plot being a scaled down version of the Japanese survival classic ‘Battle Royale’, it’s not the most original piece of cinema out there, but I did like this a heckuva lot more that the ‘Friday the 13th’ remake, and once it got rolling it was plenty entertaining. Not a classic in any way shape or form, but above average entertainment nonetheless.
