Grim

Just a couple of times in your lifetime, you will come across a movie so bad, so horrendously, appallingly bad, that your eyes will light up and your mouth will start to salivate in the delight of it all.

Grim is one of these movies.

Right from the opening credits you know it, and by about half way through, you are beyond amusement - your lower lip will hang, slackly separated from your upper one, and your eyes will be vacantly gazing at the screen. Your brain will hate you for watching this movie.

The opening credits look like a cheap screensaver, and go on for minutes. No action, typical orchestral horror music, a black screen and some words. Finally, it finishes, and an inexplicable four second shot of some kind of underground stone casket is shown. It looks like polystyrene. The first real scene is the old ouija board trick with a bunch of teenagers in a bedroom. Well, actually, it's two guys in their mid-thirties and some 21-year-old girls, in what looks like a very cold and dark basement. There is no reason for them to be together, to be there, and to not have grown out of using ouija boards.

The acting is woeful, the editing looks deliberately shoddy (a few shots run on for about 3 seconds too long, after the action has finished, leaving you awkwardly staring), and the visual effects...well, I don't know whose brainchild the Grim actually was, but I'm guessing he's made of rubber and had a terrible childhood.

There's a lot of walking in this movie. People walk up and down, side to side and all over! There are even scene's where the characters walk off into the background while the camera stays at the scene for unnecessarily long times. But they continued walking. My legs hurt after I watched this movie. So if you like walking, then this movie is for you.

Despite references to Greek mythology (well someone carries a ball of string around a cave) and the Brothers Grimm, this Grim is the same tedious man in a monster suit movie you've probably seen way too many times before. The thrust of the plot has four dull types with the help of a a Ouija board, inadvertently unleashing Grim- a troll monster who kidnaps Wendy a female member of their number. With houses subsiding and housewives disappearing due to the monster's uncouth penchant for materialising in people's living rooms, a bickering couple are called in to investigate the local caves. They're joined of course by the remaining Ouija board users who fail to tell them about the obese troll that waits below or Wendy whose been stripped down to her underwear and tied up, yes its another cautionary tale of the dangers of `new age crap'. A high tolerance for endless scenes of people running around in caves is required for Grim, a cheap mosaic of a movie desperately stitched from several other pictures although I never thought I'd see a film that owed so much debt to 1986's Rawhead Rex. Grim makes some concessions towards the gore market with severed hands and heads waved at the audience, but the ‘meat shots' also conprise the films most unintelligible moments. The first murder frankly makes no sense at all, closely followed by what appears to be a disembowelling but actually seems more like Grim cutting up a Christmas turkey, the continuity reaches such appalling depths that when Grim decapitates a victim near the end you are actually unsure of whose head has been chopped off! Grim's director Paul Matthews with the help of assorted relatives also made Breeders (1996) an only slightly superior feature showcasing a sex crazed alien ‘loosting' after schoolgirls, there were plans for a Grim 2 but sanity must have prevailed. Interestingly Grim has never surfaced in the UK, although Breeders did manage to gather dust on the video shelves, no doubt due to the presence of several low rent celebrities in the cast like Oliver ‘The Stud' Tobias and Samantha Janus. Of the two, Breeders has the meagre edge, if only because it subscribes to a strange rhetoric that the lead actresses bum was allot more interesting than anything else. Both are ‘transatlantic' productions- read a British film that goes to fanatical extremes to pretend its American, and are frequently hilarious for that reason. Note those accents that occasional slip into twangs that are anything but Virginian or that the film quickly sends its heros into caves masking the location. Not however before the film's funniest shot, one of the characters drives through what couldn't pass for anything other than a droll English suburb so its a jot when the car stops revealing a sticker bearing the legend `Virginia Mining Company'. Grim also has a legacy that lives up to its title, a few years after the film's release actress Kadamba Simmons (billed here as Kadamba) was strangled in the shower by a crazed ex-boyfriend. This turn of events lends unexpected sadness and pathos to her roles in both Grim and Breeders (where she played a scared women dominated by an alien monster) that neither the scripts, direction or acting of the model turned budding actress really deserve. As a result however, parts of Grim such as when she's tied down by her insane psychic husband or covered in blood now seem on a gut-emotional level, hard to watch. If you were really being generous (and I doubt anyone suffering through Grim would be) it could be argued that the Matthews are producing films very much in the manner of the cheap British Exploitation films turned out in the Fifties and Sixties. Theres an almost Butchers Film Distributors edge to Grim's pathetic transatlantic tone which echos the legendary Sixties sweatshop's hiring of faded American and Canadian matinee idols in an attempt to have their movies released in some countries as opposed to some counties. Ironically both Breeders and Grim appear to reach logical conclusions around the 60 minute mark, the ideal ‘programmer' time. Sadly Grim is just another tragedy story, bearing the conclusion that theres a genuine scarcity of the filmmaking savvy needed to pull off a wild horror/exploitation film piece among the people currently producing ‘Britschlock'. Coming across less a bunch of films than a celluloid rogues galley- Death Machine, Proteus, Beyond Bedlam and Pervirella- make good the reasons why the Matthews would be cagey about revealing their local, but utterly workmanlike ‘product' like this isn't going to rock the world either. Its unfortunate then that Grim unambitious and shallow a project as it is, is only really successful in its Anglo-Saxon apeing of the very worse of the direct to video market.

I won't recap the plot to Grim in much detail - mainly because it doesn't really have much of one. And that's a shame, as underneath the long, ponderous shots, terrible dialogue and shaky script there's a reasonable enough movie trying to get out. Unfortunately, it never does, though, leaving Grim a plodding, un-involving mess.

As a first draft or a plot synopsis, Grim's script would be acceptable in the "simple plot, let's just get on with the scares" school of horror. However, it's supposed to be a finished movie. Even the heavy-handed addition of a "Basil Exposition" character, to actually explain that the creature is a troll and explain troll-ish behaviour to the rest of the cast/viewer (i.e. they live underground, eat people, don't like light) would have been a move in the right direction.

And speaking of direction, in Grim, it's pretty woeful. There isn't a single moment in this movie that makes you jump. Not one. And, with the lackluster editing and terribly repetitive soundtrack, Grim can't be recommended.

THAT SAID, I do at least give credit to the cast and crew for trying something different. And, given the choice, I'd still take Grim over any of the Hugh Grant/Richard Curtis Rom-Coms about stuttery, up-tight Englishmen and their will they/won't they romantic complications...

Terrible film about an evil, ancient monster who lives underground, but sometimes comes up to munch on the residents of an upper class neighborhood. Silly, slowing moving, and dull pic with cheap looking effects and over the top acting and no logic to boot. Even at around 86 mins. this feels way too long. A total wash. Rated R; Graphic Violence.