Totem

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'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 By the end of the decade these projects had been replaced by rubbish Roger Corman would have raised an eyebrow at, such as today's topic, Totem.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.

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.

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.

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.