The Dirties (2013)

"Two best friends are filming a comedy about getting revenge on the bullies at their high school. One of them isn't joking."

If you're expecting "The Dirties" to be another "Rampage" (2009), think again. "The Dirties" is amateur handycam crap of the highest order with semi-decent acting wasted on an unoriginal plot which ultimately peters out and stops dead just as the excitement begins. It's all talk, very little action, and mostly unconvincing characters.

Apart from the location, "The Dirties" is far too similar to Samuel N. Benavides's "None Left Standing" (2005) for those of us who know our low-budget movies. Although "The Dirties" isn't a blatant rip-off and doesn't focus on a descent into madness as well, it's certainly in the same vein. Both are about a trio of students making a film with one of them being dangerously obsessive.

The difference, of course, is that "The Dirties" uses a no-budget student film within another no-budget student film as its novelty "meta" contrivance. The levels of metafiction reach their peak with Matthew Johnson not only acting as himself but also being the director and writer of this disappointing drivel. He doesn't do a bad job for a jack-of-all-trades (and master of none), but I would love to see Canadian filmmakers come up with something more original rather than lazily reworking American movie tropes to death.

Because of its borrowings, I'm not sure if "The Dirties" is supposed to be "found footage" of some kind or if it's meant to be a bizarrely filmed "fly on the wall" drama. Either way, it failed for me aesthetically and stylistically. The unseen cameraman (who I think is called "Ed" at one point) brings up too many questions about who is filming what and why, and it threw me out of the movie several times.

As far as stories about high schools and bullies go, "The Dirties" is full of the usual clichés; jocks versus nerds and all that bullshit which, as a Brit, I never encountered and can't identify with no matter how many times the same stereotypes are forced on me. There's nothing that any of the kids do in this movie that a good old-fashioned punch in the mouth wouldn't have solved if only the emasculated characters stood up for themselves. I know this is Canadian, but Americans and Brits are usually so mouthy about expressing everything that I can't even get my head around the internalisation which leads to isolation, self-destruction, or murder. In Canada, where the myth is that everybody is nicer and less selfish, the frustration caused by repression is maybe less puzzling.

Prior to watching "The Dirties", I came across an interesting documentary called "Bullied to Death: The Tragedy of Phoebe Prince" (2010) which covers the subject of American high school bullying and its psychological effects a lot better. But, as someone whose only experience of attempted bullying has been as a "victim" of the online geek-cliques of hypocrital prudes, their whiteknights, and "flaggots" who I laugh at for being so childish, I still don't quite understand how such things are allowed to escalate. Maybe kids need to find better ways to deal with their frustrations like going outside once in a while, helping someone less fortunate, or stroking a cat.

Teenagers are nasty buggers anyway, and every modern movie and documentary which shows the younger generation and their infantilised parents is an argument to bring back corporal (and capital) punishment. In my day, a few hard whacks with a cane would've sorted everything out. But enough of me on my soapbox. Suffice it to say that the predictably violent but very brief (and punch-pulling) ending of "The Dirties" is the culmination of what happens when you spare the rod and spoil the child.

"The Dirties" isn't a movie recreating Columbine or any of the other famous school shootings, nor is it meant to be, but what it's trying to say as a drama about teenage relationships, loneliness, and a kid who can't tell fiction from reality anymore doesn't work either. It's all too tame, and even an old British kids' TV show like "Grange Hill" dealt with the topics in a more controversial and satisfying way over 30 years ago.

If you're looking for something gritty, I recommend skipping this one.

V/H/S (2012)

"When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they bargained for."

I'm not going to lie to you, this isn't a review. I didn't actually get to see enough of "V/H/S" to even write the shortest horror movie review ever. I can't tell you who was in it, who directed it, or any details at all, and, quite frankly, I don't care about this piece of crap.

I started watching "V/H/S", and at the 15 seconds point when "The Collective" logo came up followed rapidly by the "Bloody-Disgusting" logo, that was it for me. OFF! I have nothing but contempt for those sellouts, and I certainly never wanted to watch one of their amateur horror offerings. I know I should have done my research more carefully, but honestly, I never expected them to go through with their threat to start making their own feeble movies.

Since I was stuck with it, I thought I'd better at least attempt to see what all the film festival fuss was about, but after struggling through the motion sickness inducing prologue and the even shakier first story about a succubus, that was enough. I PUKED!

More than that, I kept on puking until I thought I was going to bring up every meal from last week along with the tomato skins and beans on toast which I don't remember eating. After about an hour, because I'm a masochist, I even tried to watch the rest of "V/H/S" on fast-forward. I saw a few boobs, but the picture was jumping so badly that I threw up again. Bleeeeurgh!

Well done, whoever, for making a film so shaky that it was completely unwatchable. Bulimics everywhere will salute you!

Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen (2008)

"Will Spanner, the reluctant heir to a dark legacy, is once again thrown into battle against the forces of evil when a series of gruesome murders begins to take place. The victims are all brutally murdered in a ritualistic fashion - the heart is missing from each of the corpses."

You may remember that I purchased this a month ago from my local pawn shop, but things move pretty slowly round here and it has taken me until now to watch it.

What makes my movie reviewing time frame even worse is that I interviewed one of the actresses from this, Zoe Hunter, way back in March 2006! In fairness, that was nearly two years before the DVD eventually came out and, in that time, I completely lost interest in the project.

If you are at all familiar with the "Witchcraft" series then you'll know that they aren't exactly outstanding. To be blunt, they are all a load of straight-to-video crap with some boobs in them occasionally. I don't think any of them rate higher than a two-point-something on the IMDb and, alas, "Witchcraft 13" doesn't even deserve half of that.

As soon as I saw the poor excuse for a menu that whomever made the DVD put on it, I felt any desire to watch the contents of the DVD slipping away rapidly. I'll give them that it was functional, but it looked as if it was done with a very early freeware Windows DVD authoring program. Have I really got disc number 94?

Once the film started, you'll find this difficult to believe, I know, but things got even worse! The quality wasn't even up to YouTube standard and the volume was so low that I had to crank it up to 200% to hear the horrendous dialogue normally. Suffice it to say that I wasn't very impressed with any of the production values. Also imagine, if you will, every expletive known to man that came out of my mouth as I tried to watch this piece of handycam shit.

The story itself was dull, the characters were nondescript, and the acting was virtually non-existent. I honestly believe that I have never encountered such an uncharismatic and uninteresting cast in a movie of any kind ever. I really hope that anyone involved in this was actually trying to act though and isn't in any way like any of the characters in real life.

As expected, there was some minor nudity but not, unfortunately, from Falin Proffitt who played Laura. She was by far the most attractive "actress" in this and it's a pity that, due to the awful quality of the DVD, the screencap above had to come from the official (and misspelled) trailer on YouTube.

My old MySpace friend Zoe Hunter kept her clothes on (which was a bit mean of her), another girl ate fire in her underwear (no, the fire was not in her underwear, that's just how the sentence turned out), and I hate to be so mean about it but the only girl who did get nude looked as if she was a pro (and not a professional actress either).

This was just porn video stuff but without any real porn or an entertaining story. Being the masochist I am, I stuck with it to see if at least the gore effects would be alright, but sadly, they were the no-budget kind as well.

"Witchcraft 13" absolutely reeked of the "Hey guys, I've got a camera, let's drink beer and make a movie!" mentality which reached its peak about 6 years ago. Fortunately, nearly all the wannabe directors, actors and actresses from that time have all got older (though maybe not wiser) and moved on to other things now so I rarely have to endure crap like this anymore. Even if they haven't given up, I hope that the former fanbase who once supported these idiots got sick of this rubbish and have moved on from it themselves. Movies like this gave (and still give) "independent horror" a very bad reputation.

Considering that I once saw this very DVD sitting on the shelves in my local Hollywood Video just waiting for some poor soul to waste a rental fee on it, it's no wonder that they went out of business and had to sell all their stock to the pawn shop. I have no sympathy for anyone who thinks that something like this counts as a real movie or who would try to pass it off as such.

I really can't think of anything good to say about "Witchcraft 13" except (as usual) that I'm glad it's over and I will never have to watch it again. This crap was absolutely disgusting on every level and a complete insult to the intelligence of its audience.