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I can't believe that people are trashing this film! If it's not the PG-13 horror film haters, which I'm one of those myself, it's people who expect some much from the little guys. This film wasn't handled by a multi-million dollar studio, it was handled by a true student of horror like, hmm, ourselves, with a little bit of money and an idea. I totally respect Mena for paying homage to films like: "The Town That Dreaded Sundown", "Psycho", and yes "Halloween", but folks give me a break! This film was good, violent, scary and had a storyline, two different plot points to be exact, along with a back story coming soon to theaters. Stay off these guys, they are one of us, one of the little guys who are trying to make Hollywood into what it used to be, to what we dreamed of, not what it has become.

"Malevolence", is a true horror film that everyone should watch! No it's not the best acted film I've ever seen, or the most horrific cinematic experience I've witnessed, but it's a true visceral, surrealistic film, that only the old 70's flicks could approach. Forget the lavishing special effects, with the beefy soundtracks packed with the latest heavy metal hits and hot models turned actresses. If you want to see a true gritty horror film, with big scares, large knives, synthesized effects and a potato bag wearing maniac, rent this puppy, she will deliver, I promise!

I just enjoyed this flick. However, having read the other reviews, I'm seriously wondering if viewers may have been on crack or are close friends with the director? Are they serious? No, seriously? I think that the best aspect of the movie is the fact that the director imbued it with so many MAJOR components of 80's B slasher flicks - the really bad synth music, the twisted ankle, the incessant screaming, the double twist ending - but without a hint of irony, which is rather difficult to do I would imagine! The tone is extremely deadpan. If someone had told me I was watching a horror movie made in 1988, I would have completely believed it - and is a very significant statement coming from someone like me by the way. Whether intentional or unintended, the movie works for both thrills and chills. Fun stuff - no second coming like a few other critics declare. An addendum to this story. My good friend left several messages recently for me indicating that she wanted to go to "Male Violence" - yes, several times she told me that we simply must see "Male Violence"? I asked her to spell it for me..."M- A-L-E-V-O-L-E-N-C-E"...."you haven't heard about Male Violence"? So in thanks to this movie I learned that my friend can't spell or really speak...wow.

I've been wanting to check this out since learning that it won Best Feature at the 2003 NYC Horror Film Festival. Now after watching it I'm guessing every other film it was competing against must've REALLY sucked.

Malevolence is in no way a bad film, yet it's just not that good either. The concept of mixing a robbery-gone-wrong story with a slasher film is pretty original, but this only makes it's heavy use of slasher clichés drag it down into mediocrity. What would be perfectly acceptable idiotic behavior from stupid teenagers in a fun slasher film, becomes unbearably frustrating because one would expect more from the unconventional characters portrayed here.

As the film stumbles forward through all the usual "scares" of the genre, I only became more and more frustrated by how a good idea is just thrown out the window in order to fall back on things that have been done to death (and much better) 25 years ago. All this is topped off by a soundtrack that was obviously intended to be "old-school" yet comes off as just really annoying and repetitive.

Still, as far as low-budget indie horror flicks go, Malevolence is decently shot, and while it does bring in a new mix to the formula, it immediately waters it down by simply not doing anything worth-while with it.

Trusting some good reviews here I went ahead and watched Malevolence not expecting anything great but just looking for some entertaining slasher movie. If you add some imagination the very beginning of the movie might be quite intriguing, but once the actual plot develops it just annoys the hell out of you. The acting is miserable, the storyline is so predictable and shallow that there were some parts when I thought well?...maybe it's supposed to seem predictable and there's going to be some cool and unexpected twist now...Uh.Okay. Perhaps now?..No?..So I naively kept expecting and kept being constantly disappointed. Oh, and I must say I did jump out of my seat a few times - but not because I was scared, it was because of the music effects that can give you a serious headache. All in all, could have been an OK movie if it wasn't for pathetically poor acting and a storyline a ten year old kid could write.

I rate movies based on whether or not Im scared/entertained. I do not care what the budget is or if the director is "one of the little guys." You don't score points just for trying. With that said, this movie was complete crap. There was nothing scary about it. The fact that people have used it in the same sentence as TCM or Halloween is absolutely astounding (yes, we all know the director had friends and family post reviews here). The plot was boring and slow and there were zero scares. I go into movies looking to have fun, so I don't care if the acting is bad or the storyline not the best. But this movie was just plain flatout boring.

This movie's eerie, I'll give it that. But scary? Sadly, no.

A bank robbery goes wrong, the survivors rendezvous at a house, someone evil is in the house. Bank robbery aside, this movie has been done. And done. Many, many times before. I respect the fact that the movie was shot for practically nothing and that it represents a noble attempt to return to those halcyon days in the horror genre when killings were brutal, the production decidedly unpolished and, for the most part, the movie terrifying. But rather than paying homage to films like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Malevolence" adds nothing to them. "Continuing in the tradition of" is very different from "aping."

Ultimately, this movie is more Greek tragedy than horror. Things start off at a turning point for the characters, things fall apart, people die. What the movie's lacking is a real sense of horror. It's awfully hard to be scared when everything happens right on schedule.

I also was at Horrorfind 2004 in Maryland and went with other two people that commented on here to this movie. I have to say, I'm glad I didn't pay any money to see it.

This movie looked very promising and it was a huge let down. The acting wasn't good, the lead lady was annoying and all I could think was when was she going to die. She couldn't seem to decide whether she wanted to have a British accent or not.

The dialogue was terrible and the story was very lacking. The music was redundant and loud, not suspenseful like it was meant to be. It was a huge let down.

We were asked before the movie started that if we had some positive comments about the movie to please go to the cameras at the end of the film...I only saw one women go to the cameras...Everyone else walked out of the theatre shaking their heads...They all looked disappointed.

This movie isn't worth the view...and nowhere near a good horror film.

No, it's not terribly original.

It is certainly reminiscent of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc. in many ways. Oddly, it also called to mind for me a recent movie: Dead Birds (2004), which also started with a bank robbery where people got shot, and the robbers holed up at an abandoned house they knew about, where they get picked off by evil. Unlike Dead Birds, there's nothing supernatural in the movie apart from the killer's ability to take a licking and keep on ticking, but that's nothing new for a slasher.

The first storyline we are introduced to is that someone has been abducting children and killing them. Years later, a woman watches her daughter playing softball.

We also meet a young couple, and they along with the girl's brother and another man are going to rob a bank of about a half of a million dollars. The boyfriend needs the money to pay off loan sharks (I think), otherwise he wouldn't be in it. They're to meet up at an abandoned house where they will split the money and then split up themselves.

The couple and the brother are in one car, the other man is on his own. His car gets a flat, for which he is evidently unprepared, and he carjacks an SUV, which belongs to the mother and her softball-playing daughter, who are forced to come along with him. The three of them make it to the abandoned house first, and violence erupts.

The weakest part of the movie for me were the musical "stings" when the killer shows up or proves to be missing. They were pretty cheesy, to the point of spoof almost.

While the movie isn't very original, I nevertheless felt it was pretty good, and am surprised at some of the hostility towards this movie by other users. That said, if you're going to watch one bank robbers killed by evil in an abandoned house horror movie from 2004, I think Dead Birds is the more interesting one.

I think to like this movie you have to really appreciate its complete seriousness about and reverence for the millions of movies that came before it. It's not Black Phone or The Babadook or Sinister or Scream or Get Out or Hereditary or Paranormal Activity.

What it is is a very atmospheric, slasher B-movie that has a lot of flaws but, given budget constraints, very clearly is a labor of love. And while it wasn't scary, the music and sets and shots were creepy and, for me, they produced a sort of fuzzy nostalgia in me for all the times I sat in some dark room watching a movie like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Sleepaway Camp for the first time.

Give it a shot. You'll know in the first half hour if you want to finish it.

Totally derivative. Nothing original here. No story, no suspense, no gore, no thrills, no chills. This is my first review here and I felt it fitting to use it to warn others off from this film. It's not a terrible film, it's just one that has been done better a thousand times. The best part is watching and naming what movie each scene was ripped off from. The beginning, think Dusk to Dawn, with bad acting and totally unlikable and obnoxious characters goes on forever. Most of the remaining film is a blatant TCM rip-off, think remote location, abandoned buildings. The dialog at the end between the local police and the FBI is laughable at best. Troll 2 had better dialog than this crap. Oh, yeah, be prepared for a ride all right, a ride in your oldest sisters broken down VW van, uphill all the way with the air conditioner on and the windows wide open.

First off I have to say that I rented this at Blockbuster thinking it would be a piece of crap. I'm a huge horror buff so I pretty much rent anything genre related, even if it is a turd. Especially if it has Anchor Bay on it. I've seen my share of slasher films so I immediately felt like I was in familiar territory.

The film starts out with a little boy being forced to watch a young lady stabbed repeatedly. Then the film gets into a bank robbery that doesn't turn out and has the criminals fleeing to an old abandoned house. One of the hostages manages to escape and leads them into an abandoned slaughterhouse where a demented serial killer is shacking up.

One thing I noticed about this indie flick that sets it above others is that you can watch it on your plasma screen TV in HD. The sound is great when you blast it on 5.1 and just feel the vibrations from the bass heavy score. It makes you feel very unsettled. The camera work on this is a lot different from most other horror films, more than once I was treated to beautiful scenic lingering shots. You can tell a lot of work went into the sound and atmosphere.

The acting is a little hammy in spots but the cast of unknowns are very believable. I was relieved that the newest twenty something teen/TV star wasn't running around acting scared and spouting catch phrases. The acting is mature and serious. There's no self referential humor that is usually found in horror flicks these days. The whole thing is dead serious and reminded me a lot of another great slasher film I saw recently called Wrong Turn. A solid horror film looking to make you squirm and jump from what you see & hear. That's what I used to love about grindhouse horror films, they didn't try to be hip and make you laugh, they went for the throat. Malevolence is a return to this style of film making. That's not to say there aren't clichés but it blends them into such a provocative cocktail, it is kind of like reliving the good old glory days of horror.

With all the PG-13 teeny bopper nonsense doing so well these days Malevolence is like a breath of fresh air. The slaughterhouse location was creepy as hell and all of the stuff you see in the slaughterhouse was found on location and utilized on the set. This gives it a visceral punch, none of the sets look fake ala the new TCM remake.

The horror in Malevolence exists on a lot of different levels, the characters themselves are not purely "good" or "evil" and it is sometimes hard to feel for some of them. I found myself conflicted over if I was scared for some of them to die or if I wanted to see them gutted like a deer. The characters are anything but cardboard that's for sure.

Easily said that if you like Halloween, the town that dreaded sundown, Just Before Dawn, The Prowler, The Burning or Madman you will definitely love this. I have seen my share of slashers and this is the best of the recent pack. I know the genre has been done to death but there's still a lot of meat on the bones and Steven Mena does a great job of proving this.

For all the real horror fans out there, open your mind and give it a shot. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. My only regret is that I didn't go watch it in the theater when it was playing here in Toronto.

I look forward to the director's next effort.

This movie is such a piece of garbage. It is a total rip off of TCM for one. The screener that I saw even had Leatherface saying how good this movie was. (they must have gave him a lot of money) It starts out with a crappy plot about a bank robbery gone bad and the brother of the girlfriend gets shot. From there he dies in the car and the two main characters talking about find soft ground to bury him in. Soon afterward they are putting their clothes back on. WTF! What did they do with the body that they had to put their clothes back on!! Not to mention the killer in the movie wears a pillow case on his head which is just plain silly. And like any horror movie you think he is dead a bunch of times and he gets back up and pops up later. A very unoriginal plot and music that will make your ear drums bleed. I was watching this outdoors with about 40 other ppl and every time some suspenseful music came on everybody groaned because the music actually hurt our ears. Awful Awful movie do not waste your money.

I understand it's an homage, I understand what it tries to do, but...if your way to homage some bad acting in old films is just replicating that, you will get...bad acting. The best way to do it would be to put some comic layer to it, but nop, it's just shockingky bad acting, and I'm not surprised that no one from this cast is currently a great actor.

Liked the score and the killer was alright, but the story is totally all over the place and the film is just not that interesting.

I had the displeasure of viewing a screening of this movie at the recent Horrorfind Weekend Convention in Hunt Valley, MD. I had high hopes because Anchor Bay is a great company that usually puts out great movies. Unfortunately this was not the case. The movie was boring, the music was annoying, and the story line was lacking some good content. I will say that the acting wasn't too bad, but the bad story line didn't help them any. If the writer would have stuck with how the movie started out, and played along with that story, then it would have been one amazing movie.

The first 5 minutes made it look extremely promising, but it went down hill after that. This is one I wouldn't mind seeing a remake of. After the screening they wanted us to say good things about the movie to the camera, but I'm sorry to say that even though I so wanted to, I couldn't because of the let down of the movie. Steven Mena does have some good potential though as a director, but he might want to leave the writing up to someone else.

After a bank robbery doesn't go as planned, the criminals seek refuge in an isolated abandoned house. Soon the robbers and their two hostages find themselves terrorized by a madman. This movie is like a combination of two other horrors released around the same time: "Dead Birds" and "Toolbox Murders." Unfortunately, it isn't as effective as either of those films. The director and many reviewers have claimed this is a return to the gritty 70s style of horror film-making, but I found this to be more like your average 80s slasher. However, it doesn't have that ambiance that a film could only have by being created in the 80s. It isn't nearly as entertaining. I watched parts of the Director's commentary, and all of the things he pointed out as "homages" are things that have been done so many times that they most fans would probably take them as genre clichés and not homages. The most irritating part about this movie (besides the average acting) is the musical score. For the most part, it is eerie and subtle. However, whenever something scary happens, someone goes wild with the Casio, and the effects are grating. While "Malevolence" isn't a terrible movie, I'd honestly rather sit through an 80s slasher than a modern film that tries too hard to recapture that era.

I understand a lot of the hate this film gets here, it's derivative and not wildly original. However, I make the argument that, really this was a seriously low budget film that actually did I good job at what it set out to do.

I first saw this film as a kid, and as you might expect, it scared the SHIT out of me! It's very likely that the experience people who were in they're youth when they first saw the texas chainsaw massacre and halloween, was the same I had with this film. The mother/daughter relationship resonated with me and has always had a beep effected for me. And for that this film set out exactly to do what it set out to do. And even now as a young man, I still gravitate back to this movie even with my later exposure to bigger and better horror classics. It is in part very good at what it does and the love for 70s and 80s horror shines though.

This was possibly the worst movie I have ever seen. It was so boring that I had my car keys in hand, ready to leave 30 minutes into it. The people I was with thought it may get better so we stayed. It was a complete waste of time and money. The acting was horrible, the plot was predictable, and the music was so annoying. All these people who are comparing this movie to TCM, Halloween, and Psycho are complete idiots. This goes into the genre of Blairwitch: a movie that gives the horror genre a bad name.

Come on Stevan Mena, we have seen the masked killer and heard the lame music a million times all as an attempt to scare people. Get real. It is 2004. I think we are all beyond those infantile means of being scared. Do the genre and us a favor--- scrap the other 2 in this trilogy.

I had looked forward to seeing this film for a while after reading about it. I thought this was a solid film from start to finish. It borrowed from others but in a very respectful way.

I think a lot of the other post here are very hard for no good reason. If you want to see a very good horror film this one is better then some of the more recent Box office releases of late.

I never felt the acting was ever that bad. Thought the story was tight and the writing fine, Not sure of the budget but did not have a cheap look or feel to it.

Take a chance rent this one. I hope to see more from the filmmaker.

Some horror fans are complete snobs...I just don't get them. On one hand, they'll praise a film like CABIN FEVER to high heavens, and then on the other they'll trash a film like MALEVOLENCE. Funny...I thought this was a great little horror movie, and far better than any of the mediocre fare that has been released to theaters recently.

Granted, the plot is nothing new: A bunch of people (in this case a gang of thieves and a kidnapped mom and child) are stalked and killed off by a hooded killer (in this case the demented disciple of a Satan-worshipping mass murderer) in a secluded setting (in this case an abandoned farmhouse in the country). Yep, nothing new at all.

But what I loved about MALEVOLENCE was its sheer refusal to play any of this for laughs. The truth is, this sort of thing has been done so many times most filmmakers would probably feel the need to poke fun at themselves while they're doing it. But the filmmakers here smartly go for the opposite approach and try to emulate the gritty 70's style of THE Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE. OK, so it never reaches that level of intensity, but there are some genuine chills here, and I absolutely loved the country atmosphere, which was suitably menacing.

Seriously, folks--lighten up. For a low-budget, direct-to-video (but shot on film--hooray!) slasher this is really, really good. I wish it could've gotten a theatrical release--it would've been panned by braindead critics (who automatically give these sort of films bad reviews anyway) but it still deserved to be showcased like many other, lesser horror films are. See it.

If you're looking for talented actors, superb dialogue, and excellent character development... maybe Malevolence isn't your movie. However, if you want to be scared out of your chair, biting your nails or get another great slasher flick under your belt, see this movie. Mena's brilliant score moves very smoothly along with Kimoto's cinematography, the villain is almost a solid example of the typical deranged killer (always nice), and to be honest, the story isn't too cheesy to enjoy. All in all, Stevan Mena has put together a very good slasher film. The mediocre acting, predictable falls from key characters and the sociopath murderer all fall into place to make a great scary movie; and on top of that, it's an original idea! You don't get too many of those from indie filmmakers in Wilmington.

Hell, I can't wait for the sequel.

I was one of the many that was offered a free showing at midnight during Horrorfind 2004 in Maryland. I saw that Anchor Bay was doing it and I think Anchor Bay is great so I decided to forgo some sleep and go check out this flick they're going to release theatrically. OMG, this is a huge snoozer. I can't imagine a more generic slasher than this piece of crap. Everything was bad about it! The acting was awful, the story was rubbish, the music was annoying and repetitive, and everything was predictable as well. If I weren't responsible for getting 4 people back to the hotel I would have walked out...now that I think of it I should have went to sleep in the theater.

When we got back we spoke/overheard several Horrorfind attendees who have seen the movie and I'd say about 90% were singing this movie's shortcomings. The people that didn't go were happy they stayed at the hotel to drink. I'm sure if I were drunk the movie would have been better. I could say more, but this 'film' doesn't deserve it.