Kolobos

KOLOBOS surprised me. I thought it would be your run-of-the-mill Dead Teenager movie,but the movie went far beyond mere slasher conventions. The images are genuinely surreal,the script is smart and the deaths

look seriously painful. The ending rocks and even if you don't understand it,you WILL squirm. KOLOBOS is a very good movie that deserves to be experienced.

The opening music is very reminiscent of 'Suspiria' in Daniel Liatowitsch and David Todd Ocvirk's 'Kolobos' (1999), but unfortunately this film suffers from the common ailment of low budget horror films; the problem of weak dialogue and variable performances.

The filmmakers obviously appreciate the slasher genre and at the same time acknowledge its weaknesses. One of the characters is an actress who appears in the fictional movie franchise 'The Slaughterhouse Factor,' which when the characters in Kolobos sit down to watch the series in its entirety, either mercilessly mock it or simply fall asleep as they tick off the rudimentary clichés of the genre.

Kolobos goes into the potentially interesting area of reality TV, with Big Brother (which only started in 1999) type territory being delved into. The set up has the characters answering advertisements to appear in a project where they will come together in a house with hidden cameras and be filmed for five days, having no access to the outside world.

Dario Argento 'Giallo' black gloves are given a guernsey, as are anatomy drawings, POV stumble cam, a Deep Red style tooth smashing, and the colour scheme is straight out of Suspiria and Inferno. For the U.S audience who maybe isn't familiar with 'Giallo,' Kyra is from the get-go set up as the final girl… but is she?

After an interesting start, Kolobos becomes plodding, and with a meager running time of 1 hour and 24 minutes, I still found myself checking my watch.

Read another review for the plot cause i wouldn't want to give anything away. i just wanna say i was really impressed by the quality and effectiveness that this movie had as a straight to video horror release, which there are so few of at the present. the gore is spot on, and me and my mate jonnyorange76 should know cause we have watched shelf loads of vids. (in one scene a guy gets his head rammed off a metal bath tub, and you see his teeth connect, grrrrreattt!!.) there is definatley a good amount of suspense pulled off here and the director managed to make me jump a few times, this was probably helped by some pretty descent acting instead of the usually petty crap straight to vid releases have in them. take the good advice and chek this movie out cause it has just as many shoks in as any of the screams if not more, PLUS U CAN THEN TRY AND EXPLAIN THE ENDING TO ME.

A group of 20-somethings are lured to a house under the guise of doing some sort of Big Brother type reality show and they end up getting killed one by one in various grotesque ways.

Kolobos doesn't really make that much sense, but it's well made, decently acted, and has a handful of unforgettable images that will stick with you for awhile and I'll take that over a generic, by the numbers Hollywood movie anytime. I suppose you could chalk all the weirdness up to the nightmare logic of the film. In this way, it does resemble a Bava or Argento film. The dialogue, character arcs, and storyline might be a bit flat, but it's never dull and the film looks excellent.

The ending seems to be the major issue with everyone and I'd agree - it feels tacked on and strange and almost like they were trying too hard to explain everything while, somehow, managing to make everything even more convoluted.

Besides that, Kolobos is a likable and enjoyable piece of nightmare cinema that comes highly recommended.

"Kolobos" opens in someone else's point of view, someone who's obviously out of it, wandering the night-time streets aimlessly. The person is suddenly hit by a car, and when one of the vehicle's occupants gets out to check on the person, we find out that it's a female as she faintly utters the word "kolobos". The girl is taken to the hospital where she is operated on before being put in a room to recover. The patient next to her decides to read newspaper ads to her for the hell of it, and one of the ads triggers her to remember everything that has happened to her (we also find out that her name is Kyra, and she has spent time in a halfway house). It's an ad looking for five young people to participate in a groundbreaking new experimental film. They will be stuck in this big, fancy house with video cameras watching their every move. There's just one problem. Something is very awry in this house, and all hell is about to break loose. Could ex-loony Kyra be behind it all, or is there something much more sinister afoot?

"Kolobos" is a film which I passed by many times in the video store and never even thought about checking out, as the cover made it look like yet another DTV waste of space. Later, I saw some raves about the film on one of the boards I frequent, so I decided to finally check it out was promptly blown away. The film's cover art does not do it justice at all! It's easily one of the most atmospheric, downright creepy as hell independent horror films I've had the pleasure of viewing.

The characters are all well-portrayed, the actors making them feel like real people in search of their own 15 minutes of fame. It's somewhat ironic that Amy Weber, who plays Kyra, actually went on to be one of those flash in the pan types herself. Too bad, as she's actually quite solid here. The authenticity of the characters makes the brutal gore harder to take than it normally would be. The first death in the film, for instance, not only took me by total surprise, but it was disturbing to watch as the victim slowly succumbed. I didn't even like this particular person, but the brutality and realism, both in character and reaction, managed to get under my skin.

The house makes for a creepy setting, and it oozes a sense of the foreboding right from the start. The film's score also helps, and it should seeing how it sounds quite similar to the masterful music from "Suspiria" at times.

This film took me by surprise and turned out to be one hell of an intense gem in the often generic sea of direct to video horror. It is now a permanent fixture amidst my collection, and I wouldn't have it any other way.