Jolly Roger: Il massacro ha inizio...

I'll just cut to the chase. Instead of renting/buying this movie, take a few bucks out of your wallet, throw the money in the toilet and take a big ole dump on top of it. Flush.

There. Same difference.

Of course, THE ASYLUM has produced little watchable product so it comes as no big surprise, but this one is worse than usual. It looks like it was filmed as quickly as possible with absolutely no regard for logic, style or even entertainment. There's some gratuitous female nudity thrown in no doubt designed to try and draw your attention away from the fact that this is nothing but a steaming pile of cinematic poo. I'll be hardpressed to try anything else from these people. Avoid at all costs.

I'm a huge horror fan & can be pretty forgiving at times when the film has next to no budget, but tries its best to work with what its got. Some have managed to pull it off quite well (Ex. Hide & Creep (2004)). This movie is simply HORRIBLE...just HORRIBLE. The acting is non existent, the pacing has been stretched out to extremely BORING levels to flesh out what needed to be a full-length "film" (if you can call it that) & Jolly Roger's makeup is just laughable. Maybe the only redeeming quality are the hot STRIPPERS...but even a nice rack couldn't save this turkey! I regrettably watched this on a trip to Miami & wanted to gouge my own eyes out from how BAD it was! Complete Garbage! I implore you to stay FAR AWAY!

What happens when you combine the Lower-echelon (of) Actors Guild with what appears to be the masterful effects of a high school editing suite? You get this oh-so-very-bad film.

From the outset, you know it's bad and the producers don't seem to want to hide from this.

The heads bouncing around like basketballs were fab and the camera techniques were non-existent. One in particular took the cake, in which a CCTV camera captured the murders in a strip joint. Watching the replay of the murders, you'd expect the security camera's angle to be used. No way! The sequence is just a repeat of the murders (from all different camera angles), only in black-and-white.

Don't get me started on the fact our skeleton pirate's white skin can be seen in the final sequence.

Thar! This Blows!

A rather jolly film if you pardon the pun, but not really very frightening. The plot is very reminiscent of "The Fog". A dead pirate comes back and kills descendants of his crew who mutinied against him 300 years earlier. It's a film to watch if there is nothing else on the TV. Don't take it too seriously and treat it as a bit of fun. The acting is not of a great standard. There would certainly not be any Oscar nominations for this picture. I haven't heard of any of the cast although the leading lady, Kristina Korn is quite pleasing on the eye. The decapitation scenes, of which there are many are humorous but certainly not scary.

This is another one of those in-betweeners--similar to Kali: Tears of a Clown or whatever the hell the name of that film was . . . oh, yeah--after working up the energy to click a couple times, I see the proper name of that one was just Tears of Kali. An in-betweener is a film that's not low-budget-crappy enough to be directed by John Specht, but no major studio put 20 million dollars into this puppy, either, so you can't expect something as slick as, say, I Know What You Did Last Summer. In fact, IMDb is telling me that Jolly Roger was made for a mere 500 grand. For that amount of money, and considering how "hiss" poor this could have been if Sub Rosa would have backed it instead, this isn't a half bad film.

In fact, I popped it into my DVD player with the anxiety that it was going to one of those shot-on-a-99-dollar-DXG-video-camera messes where I can't hear any of the dialogue unless I crank up my stereo to 10 and put on a pair of headphones, but director Gary Jones and crew went to pains to ensure that this back-from-the-dead avenging Pirate slasher flick looks and plays relatively professional. That's not to say that you can't tell that this is a low budget indie: the acting can be rougher than the Pennsylvania leg of the Appalachian Trail; you'll swear that at least one actor had to be a producer or closely related to a producer; the music has a generic porno film quality; there are a number of weird jumps in the narrative where it seems like a reel of film or at least a couple script pages must have been lost but they just didn't think it was that important; it's often difficult to tell if the script was supposed to be written as more of a comedy--you'll certainly be laughing at some dialogue and events--like the ridiculous cop/coroner(?) and the fact that one protagonist figures that the best way to record a list of names off of carved stone with a paper and pencil is to do a rubbing.

But despite all of those blemishes, despite the fact that the plot is obviously cribbed a bit from The Fog and the villain was designed to cash in on the mega-success of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean films, I found myself enjoying Jolly Roger more often than not, and it's not just because of the traditional slasher film move of showing plenty of breastages--although that certainly didn't hurt.

The title character is a nice, kinda campy idea for a new slasher villain. Jones and co-writer Jeff Miller wrote a simple but captivating and even occasionally suspenseful story where they do a decent job of weaving together a few different threads. Jones' timing is pretty good--the film has a nice flow aside from those few weird narrative jumps. Although some of the acting is rough, some is not bad at all. They found great locations. They made the smart move of putting a lot of the money they had into cameras, film, sound and effects.

I know some people said that the effects in the film looked cheap, and occasionally, they do look fake--for example, the Jolly Roger character clearly has a mask on with black makeup around his eye--but for this budget level, the effects are pretty incredible. There are decapitated heads galore, for example, which are modeled just as well as any 100 million dollar film. The actual scenes of violence--often leading up to those fake heads--are slightly rougher, but they're not at all bad. Rough technical problems are often cleverly shot around, and you'll never EVER see effects even a quarter as good in a Sub Rosa film unless they have a serious change of production philosophy and probably an influx of inheritance money from some long lost member of the Stanze clan. Even the Jolly Roger character, despite the obvious mask, isn't at all bad. The design of the character is great overall, and I actually prefer that Jones didn't just shoot his face in darkness all the time--a viewer should be able to use some imagination.

Don't pass this one up just because it's not perfect--just don't expect anything high gloss, and watch it with a sense of humor--there are occasional moments of enjoyable, sublime absurdity for those of you like me who enjoy that kind of thing. I'd love to see what Jones and his collaborators could do with a Jolly Roger sequel if they had at least 10 times the budget and maybe some input from Frank Henenlotter.