Recently, I watched a new independent horror film called Meadowoods. Now, I understand that independent films have a lower budget than those made in Hollywood, but there was no excuse for this movie. It was maybe one of the worst I have ever seen. Two weeks ago a couple of friends and I rented Meadowoods from a Redbox location and attempted to watch it. We failed. After getting forty minutes in, we decided we would have a much better time simply going to sleep. Last night I was hanging out with a similar group of people and we were discussing the experience. We decided that we did not give Meadowoods a real chance. So, at eleven o'clock we decided to figure out where we could rent this movie in order to watch it again. We searched the internet for a Redbox that carried the movie, and the closest one was across town.
We had already made up our minds. This movie was not bad. We just had a bad impression of it. So we left the house to look for the movie. After getting lost multiple times on the simple route and making one of the largest loops around town we finally arrived at our destination. My friend jumped out of the car and quickly paid for the movie. When we got back to the house we looked at a few reviews of the movie before playing it. None of them were positive. I believe the movie recieved one star. But there werer hardly any reviews, so maybe only the people who did not like the movie wrote something. That is reasonable, right? No. I believe the reason there were only a few reviews is because no one else wasted their time watching the full movie.
As soon as we put the movie in we ran into trouble. It was severly scratched and began skipping after only a few minutes. We took the movie out. We thought the movie still had potential, so we looked up ways to fix a scratched DVD on google, and after sorting out the more unrealistic ones we settled on using furniture polish to clean it. Not that that made any sense... However the Pledge did seem to help a little, and after fast-forwarding through the initial scratch we did not run into any more severe problems for a while.
The plot of the movie was boring and unrealistic. Three teenagers wanted to kill someone and get the whole process on video. I do not understand what they were planning on doing with the video considering the fact that if it was found they would be arrested, but whatever, it was strange. When asked why they wanted to kill someone the first guy responded that he was bored of his town and wanted to shake up the residents. Boredom seems like a pretty stupid reason to commit murder, but it at least made a small bit on sense. The next girl questioned said she wanted to kill someone because, well why not kill someone, people just hurt eachother so there is not really a point to life anyways. That seemed stupid. I suspected she was either a sociopath or the writers were simply to uncreative to come up with a better line. The actress also spoke in a monotone, which really helped the delivery. When the third person was asked why he was going to kill someone, the disc scratched, and that was probably for the best.
The movie continued on in this boring matter while they choose their random victim. They liked to speak about the murder in public places without lowering their voices, and no one ever seemed to get suspicious of them. There was a good twenty minutes of film when they were interviewing their intended victim, trying to find out what scared her most. She also sang a song she had written herself during the interview, which was not all bad, possibly the high-light of the film. The teenagers then went to the movie store's horror section for inspiration for how to kill their victim. They decided on a tactic used in Kill Bill Volume Two. I believe the climax was supposed to be when they kidnapped their victim, Kayla, but I am not really sure seeing as the DVD skipped that section too.
Next thing we know, two of the characters are pushing Kayla into a wooden box at gunpoint. I guess they were planning on burying her alive. There was at least ten minutes of footage where the screen was black and Kayla was screaming, supposedly taken while they were burying her. They tormented her for a short while, then the third teenager showed up. Apparantly he had changed his mind about the murder and was going to stop them. The ending of the movie was very unclear. One teenager was trying to shoot the teen who was disrupting their plan while the monotone girl shouted for them to stop killing eachother. All of a sudden the teen with the gun shot himself for no apparant reason. The disrupter then dug up the box in under a minute (I do not think it was buried very deep), and drug out Kayla, who was already dead. Perhaps the box collapsed on her? It was all unclear. The high-point of the film was definitely the credits. Under the title "Cast" there were only four characters listed. Clearly this film had high budget. And I believe one of the cast members may have been filming the video at all times.
Here is what I learned. I should listen to the universe. Clearly it was trying to tell us from the beginning not to watch this movie. We fell asleep the first time, got lost trying to rent it, and were distracted by multiple scratches. I am convinced someone watched the movie and intentionally scratched it so no one else would have to suffer the same way they did. So, I have learned to trust my first instincts, seeing as it would have saved me a dollar and an hour and twenty minutes of my life I would much rather have spent on something more useful then watching Meadowoods.
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