SILENT SCREAM
Slayer! YEAH! SLAAAAAAYYYYERRRR!
I know what you're thinking - at last, somebody's taken the songs of Slayer and made movies out of them! How much longer until "Divine Intervention" and "Piece By Piece" hit the big screen? Well, sorry guys, but this is not a ninety- minute look at abortion from the fetus's point of view. (that'd be a hoot, actually, especially if somebody did a little high-pitched voice for the fetus, like Mr. Bill)
Four college students, renting out rooms in a beachside house because they were too damn stupid to find themselves lodging earlier than a week before classes start, find that the family that owns the house gets more dysfunctional in every scene. This one steals rather liberally from Psycho (taking the score and even transplanting the shower scene to the basement, making it resemble more the Simpsons' Maggie-clubs-Homer scene than the film itself), but that's not to say that it doesn't do a reasonably good job of it overall. There's a nice feeling of menace and doom here, and the characters are reasonably appealing. There's nothing in the plot here we haven't seen before, but at least here it's done with a shade of skill.
Make no mistake, this is not a particularly great movie, and I'll be lucky to remember a frame of it two weeks from now. But hey, you could do worse. I did, just the other day. Written by the guys responsible for inflicting The Fly II and Ewoks:The Battle For Endor on us.