Memorial Day

If you can believe it, *another* group of teens return to *another* lakeside cabin three years after *another* one of those fatal 'accidents' claimed one of their number. Low and behold, a psycho wearing a patterned hockey mask (a cheap papery one at that) turns up to waste them one by one. This mechanical 'Friday the 13th' knock off gained slight notoriety as one of the first digitally-shot features, but that's where the interesting facts end and all that remains is a predictable, amateur production with sub-par performances and a recurring boom-mic intrusion. A last-second twist does little to lift the spirits, and 'Memorial Day' is something best tossed in a lake and forgotten about. One for insane slasher collectors only.

First off, I had my doubts just looking at the DVD box and reading it saying that it was about of bunch of teens gathering at a lake where they will find do or something. Any movie that has a premise like this has failed miserably, even as a slasher movie, except for the first Friday the 13th.

I wanted to get up and stop watching the movie at least 10 times, but I just kept thinking that it had to get a little better. It didn't. Usually, I think every movie has something that you can take from it. This has nothing.

Do yourself a favor, and find something constructive to do for 80 minutes. Like, give yourself papercuts, or eat dirt.

Watching the rather insalubrious 'Memorial Day Massacre' the old saying, 'if something looks like ass, tastes like ass and smells like ass, then it's probably ass!' sprung all too readily to mind! But, on rare occasions, a cheap n cheesy, spit n sawdust S. O. V slasher can manifestly look like ass, have profoundly ass-like qualities, and yet, miraculously, some of its content manages to transcend its conspicuously butt-like tendencies. Well, Christopher Alender's buck ninety backwoods slasher is just that kinda super-creaky no budget camcorder campout cheese-fest! Plus points are the okay-ish acting, crude fratboy banter and the surprisingly inventive kills. The main suckage comes from the generic text, frequently ill-lit exteriors and the hooded killer's goofy papier-mâché mask. So, why did I enjoy this fitfully amusing Dollar Tree terror spree? Well, quite frankly, I'm probably far more of an ass than I'd care to admit!

Returning to the campsite where her brother disappeared years ago, a troubled woman and her friends find themselves the victims of a masked killer's blood-soaked rampage and try to solve the mystery of the killer's identity in order to get away from the area alive.

This was an exceptionally uninspired slasher that doesn't have a lot going for it and isn't all that great. About the only thing here that really works is the body count and the kills, which tie in together pretty well after you realize what's going on, but it's only after an explanation from the killer that it's known so that's going against it as we. In addition to all that, you've got the fact that the mystery angle, which is supposedly the high-point of the whole film, being really strung out and feels like too many twists were put together to sell itself, which doesn't make much sense and really sticks out. The last problem here is the beginning where we get to know the group, but instead of being character-knowledge it's just drawn-out scenes that aren't that interesting and aren't all that much designed to do that, leaving a little bit of a sour taste when getting to know the group at first. Some of the stalking scenes in the middle are admittedly pretty tense, or at least they could've been had the film not been so dark as to render everything hardly visible, at one point turning into a total blackout on screen despite sounds on the soundtrack, which is another problem to overcome. Overall, a rather disappointing slasher.

Rated Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, Nudity and drug use.

I have to say although this movie was formulaic throughout with a plot stolen from films like Friday the 13th/I Know What You Did Last Summer, this movie wasn't that bad. In fact it wasn't as bad as most of the Horror films Hollywood has released recently. The killings although at times a little too imaginative were in most instances just that, original. The cast was mediocre which is to be expected from low-budget features but much better than what that much bigger studio Artisan/Lions Gate has been offering. My only real complaint that wasn't due to the film's budget, which must have been small, was the contrived "twist" ending. I'm sorry but this is what put this film in the bad category for me. The ending was just stupid and tacked on. Before that I was a little bored, but actually enjoying it. 4/10