Film: Dead Hooker In A Trunk
Year of production: 2009
UK Release date: 23rd May 2011
Distributor: Bounty
Certificate: 18
Running time: 90 mins
Director: Jen Soska & Sylvia Soska
Starring: Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska, Rikki Gagne, C.J. Wallis, John Tench
Genre: Action/Horror/Mystery/Thriller
Format: DVD
Country of Production: Canada
Language: English
Review by: Rob Markham
Dead Hooker In A Trunk. What more needs to be said with a title like that? Revelling in cheap gore, cheap thrills and cheap laughs this offbeat road movie of sorts harks back to the days of American drive-ins where you could be pummeled senseless by images deemed to outrageous for mainstream cinemas.
After a night out, four friends discover a dead hooker in the boot of their car. After the drink and drug-fuelled fun of the night, two of them aren’t sure whether they may be partly responsible for its appearance and so they set out to bury the body in a forest.
As the friends make their way to the burial site, they are faced with the multiple horrors of a serial killer, a maniacal cowboy who seems to want the body, and several gang members hell-bent on causing chaos in the aftermath of a drug deal.
Violence, gore and mayhem ensue and the group has to pull together and put aside their differences if they are to find out what actually happened, and why…
There are several good reasons for the decline of the drive-in horror, and the fall in popularity of ‘grindhouse’ movies. One possible reason is an increasingly permissive cinema. Whatever gory, ghastly, obscene and subversive images could be found in the trashy flicks churned out weekly back then can easily be found in many mainstream horrors, and are readily (and legally) available on DVD today. We are in a more permissive age, one in which films such as Irreversible, Baise-moi, A Serbian Film, Martyrs, etc. are not only screened in cinemas worldwide (albeit not mainstream) but can also be found in DVD rental stores. It is therefore a source of great confusion that films like Dead Hooker In A Trunk continue to be made.
There could be a certain charm to the cheap look, bad effects, terrible acting and writing, and there are times when the film threatens to be fun. The fact that the characters are named Badass, Geek, Junkie and Goodie Two-Shoes suggests a level of self-awareness that seems to be totally lost in every other aspect of the film, as we are treated to a succession of badly conceived set-pieces.
It will be said that the acting is supposed to be so bad, the effects intentionally awful, and the script purposefully devoid of relevance, resonance and rationality, however, with a wealth of truly outstanding, subversive, shocking and relevant horror so readily available, why should anyone in their right mind choose to watch something so unapologetically awful? If it’s gore and fun you’re looking for then there are also a thousand direct-to-DVD offerings to choose from, and this film makes all of them look like The Shining in comparison.
The plot is a nonsense, and the whole film devoid of anything remotely resembling narrative. Four friends find a body in the boot of their car. Reactions to this discovery are mixed, as one throws up, two search the body for drugs and the other tries to inject a sense of foreboding into the scene. There is a feeling that the discovery itself is supposed to be played for comic effect; however, there is nothing funny about the writing, the performances or the look and feel of the scene itself.
From here, we must sit through a drug pick-up that turns bad when gangsters arrive with chainsaws (a la Scarface) and we find out that Badass isn’t so much a badass but a psychopathic killer. A cowboy (who looks frighteningly like Lemmy) turns up, when they finally get round to burying the body, for reasons unknown, and is dispatched like the pointless plot thread that he is, and added to this is the arrival of the serial killer who put the body there in the first place.
When the film decides it’s a serial killer thriller things start to make a little more sense, but by then it’s far too late. The scenes of gore are nowhere near as grotesque as they need to be to justify the overall mood and feel of the piece, and the moments of so-called comedy have all been done better elsewhere. A castration-aftermath scene seems to be there for nothing more than shock value, but we’ve seen it done in mainstream movies (the remake of I Spit On Your Grave for one) to much greater effect. This leaves the question burning in the mind of the viewer: what is the point of it all? It’s not fun, it’s not relevant. There are no thrills and no excitement.
In terms of performance, there are two choices: either the cast have performed a super-human feat of parodying the bad acting of films in the genre to an absolute tee, or they really are that bad. From the evidence on offer, it would seem the latter is the case.
It could all have been so different. It is part road movie, part horror, part serial killer thriller, and the ideas are there. A severed arm is reattached with a needle and thread, a killer is preying on women because of an unfortunate circumcision accident that left him deformed…actually that’s about it for the ideas, but the whole thing could have been fun if it had been shot with a bare minimum of savvy and affection for the genre and films it riffs on.
It is nearly impossible to find anything remotely enjoyable in Dead Hooker In A Trunk. It’s annoying and cheap in almost every respect. In today’s cinematic climate, there is no need to seek cheap thrills from cheap films when there are so many untapped sources for horror worldwide. If that’s all you’re looking for then you can find a wealth of world cinema releases that can give you twice the gore, twice the thrills, twice the laughs, all with better production values and comparatively Oscar-worthy performances. That’s not an exaggeration. RM
No comments:
Post a Comment