Totem

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.

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.

This movie is about 6 people who are mysteriously drawn to a small cabin out in the woods. They're all strangers to each other. Once at the cabin, they find that an energy barrier prevents them from traveling more than a few hundred feet in any direction. They also find a cemetery with a sort of totem pole in it. Actually it doesn't look anything like a totem pole, it looks like three dolls on a vertical shelf, but I suppose "Totem" makes a much scarier title than "Three Dolls On A Vertical Shelf Unit". Once night falls, one of the characters turns up dead, and everyone suspects another character of killing her, but he can't remember doing it. Then a little demonic Muppet comes running into the cabin, and they manage to drive it away. Another character turns up dead, another demonic Muppet drags off a corpse, and our characters figure out that three of them are to kill the other three for some "mysterious purpose". Probably the most unbelievable thing that occurs in this movie is when they finally figure out the "mysterious purpose". One of the girls is dragged off by a demonic Muppet, and the other is lying helpless on the floor, and then we just cut to an old Viking movie. There are flames superimposed on the lower part of the screen. A narrator explains to us that in times of old, there were some bad guys who were really powerful and nearly took over the earth. I guess we're supposed to assume that these demon dolls in the movie are those bad guys. This whole thing will just leave you shaking your head. I mean, did the demons make this up as a sort of video informational packet for their intended victims to view before their demise? And since such a big deal is made of telling up that no one has been in this cabin for 100 years, I guess we can assume there's no TV for her to watch this on. So did they just beam the video into her head, complete with extremely grainy image quality?

I won't spoil the thrilling ending for you. Basically, this is a zero-budget movie with young actors who probably haven't been in much else, and they're not helped by a lousy script (half of the dialog is just nonsense, and it's a very dialog-heavy movie). And then there are the special effects - demonic Muppet dolls. As if everything else wasn't bad enough, these guys are just comical. Then you've got one of the actors who barely speaks English. He speaks paragraph after paragraph of dialog, and it's painful trying to figure out what he's saying. There's a scene where a girl is unconscious and she's mumbling a few random syllables, which the "English as a second language" guy translates. The humorous part is that she mumbles "umph, um-mm, uhhh" and he manages to translate each one of her syllables into a couple of sentences. That must be one extremely efficient language she's using. There's also the odd habit that most of the characters seem to share of using the F word in every sentence. I personally couldn't care less how much people swear, but it's so overused here that it's humorous.

I really can't criticize the movie too heavily. It's a no-budget cheapie probably filmed in a week, and for that it gives you exactly what you'd expect. A little bit of atmosphere, a lot of bad acting, a really slow moving plot, some utterly ridiculous moments, and a cute girl or two. Okay, so maybe the whole movie qualifies as a really ridiculous moment. I still found it vaguely enjoyable. Let me put it this way: I'd rather sit through this again than watch Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

Charles Band, of course.

I found this cheesy direct to video effort under the "Totem Asesino" (translated to English is "Killer Totme"). As the title suggested, I expected a B-cheesy flick with some involuntary humor and unintentionally funny situations.

Well, I got exactly what I expected. The plot is non sense and deals with six teens (only one attractive blonde girl), who find themselves trapped in a cabin a la "Evil Dead" just to be killed (?) by an evil force commanded by a Totem.

Well, the Totem eventually makes an appearance as a cheesy horrible monster but that's another story.

This movie provides the usual Full Moon cheese plus some minimal but decent gore and horrible acting so, if you are into Full Moon you could enjoy it.

If you are not in the mood for typical Full Moon entertainment you will likely hate this movie. I'm like to suffer and that's why I rented this one a few years ago. I guess I should rent in other places other than Blockbuster...

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.