Director: Jeff and Josh Crook
Starring: Lauren Currie Lewis, Chris Ferry, Cody Darbe
Tagline: "What if every day you relived your own murder?"
Random Trivia: The original title was Salvage; Gruesome is the international English title.
Gruesome. eeehh... kind of. What Gruesome actually is can be summed up as follows: A ho-hum slasher with tepid acting, a lead actress who has a nice rack, perky nipples and a cute ass (focused upon multiple times in order to keep viewer interest up), and a story-line that owes a fair bit to Groundhog Day, The X-Files where Mulder keeps reliving the same day during a bank heist, any episode of Star Trek where the crew (any crew) encounters a singularity of some sort, and that episode of Angel where Gunn keeps getting chained up and tortured in the basement.
Sort of.
See Gruesome, having little budget and less technical prowess and star power, tried to do something cool, and turn the concept of reliving the same day/experience on its head. It's just not quite there... Lauren Currie Lewis, she of the perky nips, is actually not all that bad in the lead role. The rest of the supporting cast is stiff, and the script badly needs some better dialogue and a bit of tweaking. There's a few too many pointless scenes that are supposed to be scary, and my half-baked brain (although no, I'm not him) has decided to inform me that pointless scenes are pointless.
On top of this, the finger-tapping-a-key on the piano score gets annoying after a while, and as a result, the mix of bland rock and generic metal during the few energetic sequences the movie has to offer serves as a welcome change. I swear, I've never been so happy to hear generic radio clones.
Back on topic. Lewis plays Claire, who has a vision of her own death so real that it freaks her right the fuck out. She wakes up at work - the nightshift at some hardware/convenience stop I can't remember the name of - convinced that it's all real. As time goes on, she remembers more and more, and we get... more and more bored.
There's not a single scary movie going in this film. The most I can give it credit for is Claire's eventual death - when we see the full length of her vision unfold - which is quite gruesome, so I guess the title is well-earned after all.
Chris Ferry plays Duke, the killer, who apparently has a "weird name" to those not accustomed to the American south. "The only thing that matters is what you feel... when I cut your head off." How memorable. I'll put it on my Christmas card.
If you're insanely bored or just feeling masochistic... nah, I still couldn't recommend it. Even the weed isn't helping.
Oh, sorry about the photos. They suck. It was this or take some photos of the TV screen, but I was lazy, the camera was far, and they're not going to help you much anyway.
Overall Rating: Buzzed (1 out of 5)
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