Rating of
1.5/4
Off the Beaten Path
Drive-In Massacre - wrote on 10/10/11
Hey, remember when I said, I torture myself? Well, I continue to do so.
Let me tell you about a little company called "Pendulum Pictures", similar to MillCreek Entertainment (actually it's a sister company), Pendulum specializes in making very inexpensive movie packs of 20 or 50 or 100 films in each box, but where MillCreek puts out public domain films, many of them enormous classics (Night of the Living Dead, The Phantom of the Opera, Nosferatu, Deep Red, etc.), Pendulum puts out independently made horror films from the 90s and all the way up to 2008.
I honestly would NEVER be able to explain how bad ALL of these movies are, they are made by people who may like horror movies, but don't know the very first thing about how to make anything close to one. I'm serious, you might be thinking to yourself 'oh, like college films from film students with stupid shots and clunky editing', no. not at all. I'm serious, these are literally the types of movies you and your high school friends would make with one of your parents camcorders, this is in no way an exaggeration (aside from the pornos. Yes, there's porn on this).
But let's get to the film at hand, Off the Beaten Path. I chose this when because it was one of the shortest movies on there, at 64 minutes (one of them was a suicidally long 156 minutes, not long for real films, but...seriously just look for this boxset to know what I'm talking about), and it also seemed to be one of the most tolerable: they were going with the beaten the ground Blair Witch concept, with a handheld as it happened approach, so it was already supposed to look that way. But there was a little twist, they switch and put the same camera on a tripod to pretend its a different type of narrative, with some of the shittiest editing you'll ever see.
The movie is about 3 film makers who meet up with this woman who apparently wanted to show them a place in the woods that was linked to satanism, but once they get there she freaks out and says "I don't want to be here.", so for the whole movie the 4 main characters, all of which have very, very thick Minnesota (Fargo) accents, scream, swear, and loose it over almost nothing. They see a tree where a punk could have carved this "INVERTED CRAHSS" (said about a million times throughout the movie), and repeatedly yell "I DOE NOE" and "LET'S GET THE FUCK OUDDA HEER!"
Then it all comes to a climax when two of the actors go out on their own and find a goth kids notebook in an abandoned house, with 'pennagrams' and 'inverted crahsses' drawn on it with pen and red highlighters for blood. Eventually the two actresses and one of the guys filming become the same type of creatures from the Evil Dead, and it abruptly ends.
Yeah, it's really-really bad, but because I'm an amateur filmmaker myself, and these guys tried, and somewhat succeeded in making a 1/2 way, or mayble 1/4 way comprehensible narrative, I find it kind of commendable. The fact that I know what was going on, is more to say than for a lot of the other films on the list.
If I didn't know this was made for no money at all, I would hate in every way, but it was fun to watch, if for nothing else other than to see people try to make a movie. At the same time though, a lot of the other people did the same thing in this box set, and they don't deserve any sort of claim.
D-
