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Charles Band, of course.

I found this cheesy direct to video effort under the "Totem Asesino" (translated to English is "Killer Totme"). As the title suggested, I expected a B-cheesy flick with some involuntary humor and unintentionally funny situations.

Well, I got exactly what I expected. The plot is non sense and deals with six teens (only one attractive blonde girl), who find themselves trapped in a cabin a la "Evil Dead" just to be killed (?) by an evil force commanded by a Totem.

Well, the Totem eventually makes an appearance as a cheesy horrible monster but that's another story.

This movie provides the usual Full Moon cheese plus some minimal but decent gore and horrible acting so, if you are into Full Moon you could enjoy it.

If you are not in the mood for typical Full Moon entertainment you will likely hate this movie. I'm like to suffer and that's why I rented this one a few years ago. I guess I should rent in other places other than Blockbuster...

This movie is about 6 people who are mysteriously drawn to a small cabin out in the woods. They're all strangers to each other. Once at the cabin, they find that an energy barrier prevents them from traveling more than a few hundred feet in any direction. They also find a cemetery with a sort of totem pole in it. Actually it doesn't look anything like a totem pole, it looks like three dolls on a vertical shelf, but I suppose "Totem" makes a much scarier title than "Three Dolls On A Vertical Shelf Unit". Once night falls, one of the characters turns up dead, and everyone suspects another character of killing her, but he can't remember doing it. Then a little demonic Muppet comes running into the cabin, and they manage to drive it away. Another character turns up dead, another demonic Muppet drags off a corpse, and our characters figure out that three of them are to kill the other three for some "mysterious purpose". Probably the most unbelievable thing that occurs in this movie is when they finally figure out the "mysterious purpose". One of the girls is dragged off by a demonic Muppet, and the other is lying helpless on the floor, and then we just cut to an old Viking movie. There are flames superimposed on the lower part of the screen. A narrator explains to us that in times of old, there were some bad guys who were really powerful and nearly took over the earth. I guess we're supposed to assume that these demon dolls in the movie are those bad guys. This whole thing will just leave you shaking your head. I mean, did the demons make this up as a sort of video informational packet for their intended victims to view before their demise? And since such a big deal is made of telling up that no one has been in this cabin for 100 years, I guess we can assume there's no TV for her to watch this on. So did they just beam the video into her head, complete with extremely grainy image quality?

I won't spoil the thrilling ending for you. Basically, this is a zero-budget movie with young actors who probably haven't been in much else, and they're not helped by a lousy script (half of the dialog is just nonsense, and it's a very dialog-heavy movie). And then there are the special effects - demonic Muppet dolls. As if everything else wasn't bad enough, these guys are just comical. Then you've got one of the actors who barely speaks English. He speaks paragraph after paragraph of dialog, and it's painful trying to figure out what he's saying. There's a scene where a girl is unconscious and she's mumbling a few random syllables, which the "English as a second language" guy translates. The humorous part is that she mumbles "umph, um-mm, uhhh" and he manages to translate each one of her syllables into a couple of sentences. That must be one extremely efficient language she's using. There's also the odd habit that most of the characters seem to share of using the F word in every sentence. I personally couldn't care less how much people swear, but it's so overused here that it's humorous.

I really can't criticize the movie too heavily. It's a no-budget cheapie probably filmed in a week, and for that it gives you exactly what you'd expect. A little bit of atmosphere, a lot of bad acting, a really slow moving plot, some utterly ridiculous moments, and a cute girl or two. Okay, so maybe the whole movie qualifies as a really ridiculous moment. I still found it vaguely enjoyable. Let me put it this way: I'd rather sit through this again than watch Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

Apparently because of sputtering demand and profits, Full Moon really went cheap for several years in the late 1990's and early 2000's.

Many productions were made for only 5 figures not even 6 and far away from 7 figures during this time.

Everything seems to be affected and suffers from these very low budgets compared to what we were used to from the early 90's.

There are 6 total actors/actresses in this movie besides a couple of zombies uncredited with only a short amount of screen time.

Many were very unknown / first timers and generally the acting under those conditions and amount of experience wasn't that bad for the most part and hardly some of the worst problems with this movie.

Some were actually a bit likable, all the actresses are cute.

The movie was apparently shot in only 4 days so it seems many shots were possibly one take and what they got out of the shot is what they got, if something was screwed up they tried quick editing or had to leave some flaws in.

The special effects and the totem creatures are very mixed from adequate to pretty poor. A couple of the supposed attacks with the totems towards the end are pretty painful to watch they are so amateur. Supposedly some gore scenes had to be trimmed down to get an R rating, but there isn't much left for blood and gore, so that seems kind of hard to believe.

Watch for the grave zombies with a grotesque / rotted face and fairly normal hands and legs for a laugh.

The movie is maybe mercifully short as it runs from beginning to start of the end credits at 61 min. With 2 min. Of that a 1958 movie called The Vikings edited in towards the end as an untimely "dream sequence". Another 7 minutes of end credits roll and you have a 68 min. Cheapie from Full Moon and David Decoteau in the can.

I knew I was in trouble, when the production company for this movie showed absolutely zero production value trailers, as "coming soon" attractions. Of course, it can be said that TOTEM is a thinking person's movie. It left me thinking "why did I spend good money renting this?" I also thought: "IMDb will need to add zero to their ratings scale, if more movies like this are made." The paper thin plot involves 6 teens (inexplicably) drawn to this cabin in the middle of nowhere. They can't escape because of some invisible shield, as the viewer is informed through a very talky script. In fact, that's what most of this movie is, talk, talk and more talk. The fleeting scenes where any action occurs, seems almost coincidental. The special effects look like something performed in a grammar school production. Good grief, these kids are dull. They're NOT even nubile, which seems to be a prerequisite for teen/horror flicks! Kind viewer beware of the "TOTEM"-Of course, I mean the movie- not the object of it. You have been warned.

Group of people finds themselves unexplicitly drawn to a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. Once they get there, they discover that they can't leave the cabin as it is now surrounded by an invisible force field and a weird totem seems to be killing them off. Cheap, slow paced (even at 80 mins.) flick from Full Moon Productions is one of their worst efforts to date. Bad effects, wide eyed acting, not to mention an awful premise sink it.

Rated R; Violence & Profanity.

Why would I even watch this? It was a double feature on my Jigsaw DVD, which is quite possible the worst movie ever made. However I was bored and wanted to watch something new, so I grabbed this off the shelf. I've got to admit that it was better than Jigsaw, but that isn't saying much. The basic concept was the only thing the movie had going for it, but they ran it into the ground. 6 people find themselves part of an ancient ritual in which 3 of them must kill and 3 of them must die. If handled well, it could have been a decent plot. Of course being a Full Moon picture, it was not handled well by any stretch of the imagination. When a movie has to have a psychic, it bothers me. It's rarely more than a cheap way to get out of explaining parts of the plot. What does this movie do? The whole friggin' cast is psychic! No point explaining how or why they're at the cabin, they're just psychic and got called by some kind of force. The actors, like in any Full Moon flick, give some of the worst performances ever seen in front of a camera. Their characters are so poorly written they cant even decide on what they think is going on from one minute to the next. The random dream sequence made no sense, and if I'm not mistake it stole footage from various other films. The "mosters" looked like they were rejected from the latest Puppet Master sequel, and if you happen to be epileptic you might just get a seizure from the terrible editing and strobe lights.

Overall, this is pure garbage. Not as bad as Jigsaw, but horrible none-the-less. Avoid if you value your time.

2/10

I'm not entirely sure what happened to Full Moon Pictures in the late 90s. While I don't think you could ever accuse Charles Band & Co of highbrow, professional pictures, there was a genuine love for the craft there, and movies like Puppet Master & Subspecies would grow into moderately successful little franchises. By the end of the decade these projects had been replaced by rubbish Roger Corman would have raised an eyebrow at, such as today's topic, Totem.

Indeed, director David DeCoteau actually started life as a protege of Corman. He's actually got a fairly solid resume of B-Movies under his belt. Ok he's not Spielberg but I'd unknowingly seen a few of his movies and found them various stages of passable to good fun. This was apparently something he made as part of a contractual obligation and shot it in 4 days. It shows.

We open with 6 good looking young strangers who have mysteriously found themselves transported to a dilapidated cabin in the woods. They can only move so far outside before an invisible barrier stops them. We meet them through the eyes of Alma (Marissa Tait) who is first introduced to talkative Paul (Jason Faunt) who presents jock Len (Eric W. Edwards), brooding Native American Robert (Tyler Anderson), schoolgirl Tina (Alicia Lagano) and the mysterious Roz (Sacha Spencer) they argue a bit, before finding a mysterious totem pole style structure carved out of granite depicting 3 monstrous figures.

It isn't long before they find themselves embroiled in an ancient ritual designed to sacrifice them to bring the creatures on the totem back to life to destroy the world. Or something.

You see, there isn't an awful lot of plot here, not that makes any great sense anyway. It's an incredibly short movie, with under an hour of actual footage if you don't include the 2 minutes of The Vikings hilariously presented out of context. I genuinely wouldn't be entirely surprised if they had been set a remit of "Charles Band likes monsters under 3 feet tall, here's 3 puppets, make up the rest as you go"

The puppets aren't even good, and in a lot of scenes are clearly just the actor holding onto them and thrashing around. Incredibly they choose to focus up close on their faces in the (overly long) introduction, letting as know that the monsters aren't even worth waiting for.

I'm not gonna pretend the acting is good, but given that I'm not sure they weren't making lines up on the spot, I'm not sure I can hold that much of it against the young cast. I've seen Jason Faunt do quite well in the role in Power Rangers he'd go onto (seriously, it's one of the most watchable series of that) and Tait has a fairly solid resume (even if it includes the equally crap Witchhouse) and I was sure I was familiar with Edwards, but given this is his only credit, apparently not. Curiously, despite portraying a Native American, Tyler Anderson has an interesting accent that sounds more European to me. Sadly there's not enough written about him online to suss his actual heritage.

Totem does a lot of bad things, but at least it doesn't overstay its welcome, so I won't overdo it either. This is a pretty bad movie. It's rushed, cheap, doesn't make a lot of sense and generally has nothing you want to see. By all accounts the director himself acknowledges this.

My one line summary explains this movie to a "T". The movie looks great on the box, but that is just a ruse to get you to rent or buy this movie. Do not buy this movie? Do not buy this movie? Do not buy this movie? Why you may ask? The reason is this movie is a lousy attempt at making you scared, but first you must have a plot and this movie has no real plot and so you are not scared. The actors do not really know what they are doing. A truly great horror movie is either Halloween, Friday the 13th or Necronomicon.

Total nonsense, stupid story, bad actors and in the middle of the film there is a dream sequence/flashback that seems to have just been another film used... yay! Clever! The camera which constantly distorted the perspective is very interesting and the backdrop was also quite nice.

I enjoy Full Moon Features movies. It really does not take much for me to like them enough to give them a four or above. Bloody and/or creative kills, campy yet funny dialog, fun villains, passable pacing, it's all you need. Normally if there is a flaw it's part of the pacing. But here, this movie fails to live up to ANY of these parameters for me. Let's start at the beginning. The premise alone is a whole other level of stupid. Some kids end up in a cabin... just because? There's literally no explanation. They were drawn to the cabin randomly and now can't leave. Ok cool story bro. Moving forward, this movie barely features any bloodshed, scares, or anything of this sort. It will disappoint horror fans. This brings me to my next point, character interplay and the script. Due to the lack of actual horror, it seems like character driven interplay was meant to be the main driving force behind the film. I really enjoy that kind of stuff, but they fail this in the execution, leading to a boring film. The editing is also garbage, making continuity hard to follow. The only positive I can speak to is the directing. There are some unique shots with decent stylistic lighting and framing. It has that turn of the century style and looks modern for the time. Episodes of Goosebumps, Are You Afraid of the Dark, and The Nightmare Room that were airing at this time are better than this junk.

I saw this movie with my friends and now we have this on going joke about the "TOTEM" if you are up for a laugh than i would say rent the movie "TOTEM" but if you want to see a scary movie rent"SCREAM". So if i were going to review this movie i would give it a 0 or below. Sorry.

This 64 minute nigthmare movie is just plain boring, dumb and utterly horrible. David Decoteau (under and alias: for good reason), "directs" this mess of a movie. Poor Acting, bad directing, terrible editing, pathetic looking puppets: COME ON, WE CAN SEE THE STRINGS!!! Stay far away from this garbage. This movie will possibly make you dumber for watching it.

Six youths mysteriously find themselves at a remote cabin with a graveyard nearby. The problem is, some sort of barrier prevents them from leaving the area. Meanwhile they discover an ancient stone totem pole in the graveyard. What's going on?

"Totem" (1999) is cabin-in-the-woods horror that mixes "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" and "Evil Dead" with the Zuni doll of "Amelia" (from "Trilogy of Terror") and a little "Subspecies." The runtime is only 68.5 minutes while the overlong opening credits run 4 minutes, 40 seconds, and the end credits 6.5 minutes. This combined with 2 minutes of footage from 1958's "The Vikings" leaves less than 55.5 minutes for the actual story.

Thankfully, the story is fairly well-written and the acting is good for unknowns with the lovely Marissa Tait standing out as protagonist Alma. On the masculine front, Tyler Anderson is quite good as Robert, a tall Choctaw who never lived on the Reservation.

The director was a disciple of Roger Corman, who struck out on his own in 1984 and currently has like 180 cheap quickies to his credit. The budget was obviously less than $100,000 and probably closer to $50,000, but "Totem" is an okay experience if you're a cabin-in-the-woods connoisseur, especially of the spare-change variety. But it's the least of the four movies mentioned above.

The film was shot in Santa Clarita at Sable Ranch, which is northeast of Hollywood in the high country.

GRADE: C-

I must agree with everyone else. I too was at a local Blockbuster in

Allston/Brighton (for those of you from the Boston area; it's the one

that's now falling apart on Western Ave not the nice one in Cleveland

Circle) and I came across one of the many straight-to-video movies they

had. This one caught my eye because of the intruiging title. Totem. Must

be about Native Americans getting back what's theirs! Plus the cute

chick on the cover is a nice touch. I watched it and it almost made me

puke. How very, very sad that this was made! "Those poor actors will

never make a decent movie ever in their young careers," I thought. How

did those teens even get to that cabin? The last girl that got there

said she was in class about to take a test or something. Why didn't

anyone stop her as she left class... or ran down the street... and

across the highway??? You'd think somebody would have grabbed them and

said, "I'm not letting you go until you tell me why you are running to

some cabin in the woods in your underwear, Mister!" Why THESE teens?

ALAS, that will never get answered. Go see a nice non-straight-to-

I first rented this from Hollywood Video in 2001. This time I watched it on Tubi Free w/ ads.

This is a cheap horror film from a director who started working for Roger Corman in 1980 and started directing cheap horror films in 1984 or so and is still doing so in 2020 with 162 Directing credits. You should calibrate your expectations accordingly.

This movie created a writing solution for the lack of shooting locations. The 6 twenty-something kids were compelled to come to this secluded cabin in the woods next to a graveyard by some unknown force in their head. Marissa Tait's Alma Groves illustrates this at the beginning as she wanders over a hill and into the cabin.

There is some interesting concepts in this movie that I haven't seen in other movies, though I haven't seen a lot of David DeCoteau's films.

If you are looking for nudity in this cheap horror film, you will be disappointed. Everyone is attractive, beyond Marissa Tait and Eric W. Edwards wearing tank tops and Sacha Spencer's shirt being a little tight, there's not a lot here in that respect.

I enjoyed all of the performances. I believed the characters.

I'm not sure I understand how the movie resolved, but I had a good time watching it.

This is the prime example of something so terrible it's funny. The premise is six teenagers are transported to a cabin surrounded by an invisible barrier and one by one they are picked off by little creatures.

What makes is so bad is the acting, the plot, the "special effects" which look like they are made by special people, and the completely ridiculous overall tone. At one point there are only two left in the cabin, a pretty little blonde thing and a foreign boy (think tall, dark, and stupid) and they're talking about how they are going to die and suddenly they start making out. Then, just as quickly, they stop, and return to discussing their imminent demise.

Also, the "invisible barrier" is never really explained, nor focused on.

Overall, this is just a horrible, horrible movie. The only people I recommend it to are teenagers looking for entertainment on a slow night.

I thought that the basic premise for Totem was pretty good. Six teenagers find themselves at a cabin. Three will kill. Three will die. Granted, they told the whole plot rather than showed it, but come on. This flick is all about camp. A little bit of gore, a little bit of humor, some silly monsters and a really out of place dream sequence (no shower scene?) I was even lucky enough to get another cheesy B movie on the same disc. Not a bad deal for a night of popcorn and a few tongue-in-cheek laughs.

In the tradition of Full Moon's excellent b-horror movies comes Totem. The story of six people who find themselves mysteriously drawn to a cabin in the woods. They decide to leave and wander into a nearby graveyard that contains a totem pole, the crux of the film. The gothic style pole has three monsters carved into it. These creature are looking to raise the dead or complete some sort of ritual and they need three victims and three killers.

This movie is undoubtedly a product of Full Moon in its style, acting, and plot. The special effects are hysterical. One of the monsters who can supposedly fly sports a pair of wires that are all too visible. Also towards the end, when dead people are rising the make-up warrants an oscar award for a job well done. The corps wear rubber masks that yield no facial expressions whatsoever and when they grab for the people you can notice that nothing has been done to their arms so there is a complete contrast between the decayed face and the skin on the hands and arms.

Perhaps not an instant classic, but definitely a movie to sit down to. If

you are a fan of Full Moon's other productions you're sure to like this one. Its filled with awkward lines and, as expected, at some parts less than good acting. Even though its a bit short ( about 73mins ), head out and rent this puppy!

In TOTEM, a group of strangers -3 women, 3 men- find themselves in a remote cabin, not knowing how they got there. The area around the cabin is surrounded by a force field, keeping them penned inside. Soon, the relic of the title is discovered.

Since this is a story by Charles Band, the tiny creatures on the totem spring to life, causing mayhem. The rest is sort of a dunderheaded version of THE EVIL DEAD. It's also excruciatingly dull, as insufferable characters utter nonsensical dialogue while waiting for their doom.

Hardcore lovers of Band's PUPPET MASTER series might enjoy this, while others will throw heavy objects at their viewing screens! This movie is a rubber mallet to the forehead...