Cult (2007)

"When four college students begin investigating a cult, the group's deadly past begins to repeat itself. Despite the warnings of their professor, the students continue to dig deeper, and that's when the murders begin."

For a film that had almost a million dollars for a budget, it is hard to tell where any of it went.

Containing a lot of bit part actors who you've never heard of (apart from Rachel Miner who has been in quite a lot of things over the years), the acting is really quite poor even for what looks like a "made for TV" movie. The plot itself loses its way several times too and, after a while, it all starts to get a bit confusing as a lot of things are never properly explained.

It started well with the tale of how some Chinese woman called Kwon Yin (who was pregnant out of wedlock) had her belly sliced open and her eyes stabbed out to kill her soul but still managed to place a curse on an amulet with her dying breath.

The next scene of a cult full of very pretty women (who were obviously hired from the local modelling agency) stabbing their right eyes out too with combat knives was quite promising as well until the crap CGI effects started kicking in.

From there on things got worse and worse. The camerawork was all over the place. I don't think any of the cameramen had even heard of a tripod as everything is wobbly and shot at funny angles. For some reason I imagine that one of the cameramen had one leg shorter than the other and this was the result. I think they tried for some of those "C.S.I.-style" shots where you just move the camera and keep on shooting but it doesn't work if the camera is all shaky.

It then got more and more talky with lots of clichés and very little action. There were a couple of scenes which were supposed to make you jump but they were telegraphed so far in advance that they fall flat. All the scenes were too dark as well so even if there was anything scary there you wouldn't be able to see it.

It was just another typical and below average tale of students getting murdered one by one because one of them has a secret. Not exactly original is it? One line in it amused me though as this really was just a load of "Scooby Doo bullshit"!

It wasn't scary, wasn't particularly gory and certainly wasn't in any way memorable. I'll give it 2 out of 10 for the eyeball scene and for Rachel Miner's eyebrows.