Engine Trouble

My copy of this film is called Junior.

Unrecognizable accents in an unrecognizable location. Not even the stars know where they are. Sandra and Rebecca are friends. Really close ones. I mean, to the point where I think it's a lesbian relationship. Unless they do things differently in Belgium (yes, I had to look it up). Their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and things go south from there.

I can't imagine the first hour of the movie is more than a few script pages. Just agonizingly long, pointless scenes. Until there's a big exposition scene with the father. From there, it gets a tad interesting, hence the extra stars. "Junior" himself, for having brain damage, is really quite agile. Like the guy is a dancer or something.

Engine Trouble (2002)

1/2 (out of 4)

Typical straight to DVD flick about two females who go out where they shouldn't be an are eventually stalked by a maniac. You can call the film whatever you want but this is without a doubt one of the worst horror films I've ever seen and trust me I've seen a whole lot. The film has the budget of around five bucks but the director doesn't even try to appease horror fans. The one gore effect is so incredibly bad that you'll be rolling your eyes. I understand with a low budget you can have good effects but if memory serves me it doesn't take a special effect for some hot woman to remove her cloths.

Very rarely does a film come along that's so bad it's good. Most bad (big budget) films simply are tedious, lame and boring, and no matter how hard you try, they simply can't be enjoyed. I'm not going to name names here, but I'm sure we've all seen our share of big budget crap. The strange thing about (bad) low budget films is, that the film-makers put a lot more enthusiasm into their films and try to make up for the lack of budget. So no matter if the film turns out to be garbage, the audience can still laugh at the enormous amount of bad dialogue, continuity errors and campy performances.

"Engine Trouble" fits right into that mold. It was produced in Belgium for about 25 dollars, and it really shows. But besides from simply being crap, "Engine Trouble" actually manages to be quite entertaining. Not entertaining in a "Back to the Future" kind of way, but more in a "Plan 9 From Outer Space" kind of way. Obviously, dialogue and acting are extremely over the top, the production values are depressingly cheap and the plot has been done a million times before. But somehow this didn't really matter. I was surprised how much I enjoyed this film. As a matter of fact, I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard during a movie, even though the humor was entirely unintentional. I guess it was sheer disbelief that cracked me up. I mean, can a film really be this bad?

So, if like me you are a fan of trash-cinema, Ed Wood and Troma, you certainly are going to enjoy this puppy. Just make sure you don't watch it alone! Ask your buddies to come over, have a few drinks and enjoy. However, if bad movies are not your bag, you might want to stay away. After all, no matter which way you turn it, "Engine Trouble" still is unadulterated crap!

JUNIOR, aka ENGINE TROUBLE, is one bad movie. It looks like members of a film crew pulled their tiny resources together and made this micro movie during a break of the other bigger budgeted film and shot this one in a few days. There's no story and there's almost no semblance of any pre-production: everything was shot in one area and the cast is populated by 5 or 6 actors, all of whom are awful and show very little experience in acting or anything else.

A lot of people say that horror is better imagined than showed. Well, they haven't seen the moment when the unseen killer is on top of the roof of the car and torments the woman inside. In this case, even though the "filmmakers" might say they wanted to create horror in people's mind with this tedious scene, I 'm more inclined to believe that they shot it this way because it was cheap. It's a fine line between astute direction and penny-pinching film-making.

The really funny thing about it is that it's an exploitation film wannabe that doesn't really exploit anything.

But as bad as JUNIOR is, and it is bad, I've seen much worse than this. Like SHREDDER.

this movie is full on unadulterated crap. never before have i witnessed such misery lows of a movie. me and my brother saw this movie on the shelf in blockbuster, and checked it out. got out to the car and discovered we had another movie. unfortunately, we took the wrong one back. what we ended up with was this pitiful excuse for anything. movies just don't get any worse. all the way from the beginning it was crap. the acrobatics of the villain didn't help either. too funny. the hysterics of the woman honking on her car horn while the car is shaking was just too much. a definite must see ( if you want to die laughing that is). this thing says i gotta write 10 lines, but this movie cannot fill 10 lines. a true travesty to the film community.