Talisman

It's said that if you put a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters, one will write a shakespearean play. The other 999,999 are likely to write something like this.

The plot borders on the non-existent, the deaths are meaningless, the characters as 2 dimensional as the flaming-heart special effects. Overall, this isn't a film I'd recommend to the discerning horror film fan.

The fact it's rated "15" in England kinda lets on to the fact that it's no Elm Street, and the constant flashbacks take the film from the "mind numbing" category into the "annoying" one. The film features topics such as incest, demon worship and serial killing - seemingly, the base for a great film. However, the wooden acting (basing the film abroad gives birth to a new realm of stupidity in cheesy accents) and gratuitous special effects restricted to glowing red eyes and heart-ripping, mean that this film is as horrifying as...well....starring in it.

Harsh? Not really. If there's a plotline running through this film and not just a rehashing of more clichés than there are murders then I failed to notice it. The characters aren't fleshed out at all, the deaths follow no visible pattern and all in all the film is more predictable than a James Bond innuendo.

It's hard to come up with one word to sum this entire film up, especially without resorting to the libellous. I'd hesitate to describe it as "terrible" since it does provide some hints and tips to new writers how NOT to write a script. I'll settle for "laughable".

If you like horror movies, you have probably seen this movie, done better, before. The special effects were weak, mainly red glowing eyes, and hearts being burned out of chests. The acting was half-hearted at best, the actors seemed bored by the whole affair. The basic premise of the movie, is two teenage siblings, separated by a mysterious event in the past, hold the key to stopping a (very small) cult from helping a fallen angel destroy the world. Naturally this happens at a boarding school somewhere. The accents in the movie were awful. The fallen angel resembled a constipated Uncle Festor from the Adams Family, but he was the most menacing and convincing character in the movie. Interestingly enough the talisman the movie is named after is a large pewter-looking necklace, that features an upside-down cross superimposed on an upside-down pentagram. There wasn't any real character development, so who cared who died or didn't, so it wasn't dramatic or spooky. There wasn't enough camp to make this it cheesy. No black comedy, to make it a cult classic, so I guess this just has to be a bad movie. Watch the original Satan's School for Girls instead. I think that may have been the inspiration for this anyway.

OK, if you didn't find this movie downright hilarious and awesome, you are probably stoic and annoying. Your IQ is probably very low, because even my dog thought this movie rocked. It is not only funny, but it is clearly not mean tot be taken seriously. If the writer intended it to be serious... Then that's even funnier. Life just keeps getting better. Anyways, I recommend this movie to everyone. I saw it a long time ago it was so great.

Man I can't wait to see it again. Apparently my comment must have 10 lines of text, so I will elaborate. A young woman and male find an awesome Talisman lying around. They then are embarked on a journey to stop the evil that was all along hidden within the talisman. There is betrayal, oh yes, and a school, oh yes, a private school. A private school with fabulous school uniforms. There is a guy who looks half-Asian. There is a hot teacher.

The list doesn't end there. There is also the evil itself. Which is taking lives for it's plan of ultimate world demise. I suppose I have reached my ten lines of text. I will leave you with a few descriptive words that I would use to describe this movie:

Awesome, Hilarious, Amusing, Entertaining, Not Scary, The opposite of Horror, Worth all the time I put into watching it, Worth the time I spent looking it up, Intuiging, Exciting, etc.

This plays like a Bizarro-world version of a Women-in-Prison movie. You remember Bizarro world from Superman comic books and Seinfeld episodes: everything is like our earth, but in an imperfect (really whacked-out) way. In this case, the classic Reform School, which in our reality would be full of nubile young girls who get hosed down, is full of nubile young men. There is a food-fight in the dining hall, a lock-down and even a trustee character who apparently is coercing his roommates into providing him with um...companionship. But when the plot should head toward showers and/or a breakout, the inmates/students start getting sacrificed on the apocalyptic demonic altar in the basement and then... Well, it's never as seedy as one might hope, but you've got to give Charles Band credit for trying something different.

This is definitely not a bad movie despite what others think here. It's so short that if you have any preoccupation with boredom that is virtually destroyed. With that aside, what does this movie have to offer? It's not scary, unless you're under the age of the highest voting score here. If that really bothers you, then you might think of each villainous scene as cheesy.

This is essentially a mystery draped in the occult. A similar story would be The Ninth Gate. This is probably the kind of movie you watch in the middle of the night during October (while you're in the Halloween mood). It might bug you out more if you are half asleep, because you may have difficulty distinguishing between the dream and real sequences, and finally the last 10 minutes could be a little disturbing too.

The premise starts with a young man beginning class at an expensive international school for delinquents, and he also suffers from ominous nightmares. The flick doesn't waste too much time presenting the enigmatic main character (why is he attending this school, and what of these dreams?), and introducing an intriguing antagonist(why is he picking off people for?). Therefore, I find it hard to believe someone will have a hard time sitting through this, unless they don't like horror movies (there are supernatural evil doers), they've seen some think like it already (which I cannot come up with), or it isn't that flashy for them (this movie isn't out to dazzle you with special effects or cunning murder scenes, but it does have some respectable twists).