Terrortory

'TERRORTORY': Three Stars (Out of Five)

An ultra-low-budget anthology horror movie, telling six different supernatural tales. It was written and directed by three indie filmmakers; Dan Doran, Kevin Kangas and Mark Wenger. It stars a cast of completely unknown actors. The film is pretty cheesy, and amateurish, but there are a few quality elements to it; especially considering how low-budget it is.

The movie centers around a couple that's trying to entertain each other, while waiting for the electricity to come back on during a power outage. The guy (Brad Masters) tries to impress his female friend (Laura Kiser), by telling her five very bizarre scary stories. Each supernatural tale revolves around different people being stalked, and killed, in the woods. The segments are titled 'Gotz', 'Siren', 'The Prowler', 'Smiling Jack', 'The Drone Collector' and 'The Midnight Clown'.

At first the film was pretty painful to watch (full of atrocious dialogue, nonsense stories, and bad acting); but as it went on, I started to notice several elements I liked to it. I think to really enjoy the movie, you have to respect low-budget filmmaking; being an ultra-low-budget filmmaker myself, this is something I can do. The movie is pretty bad, in comparison to mainstream horror flicks, but for a next to no-budget film, it's not that horrible (some of it is kind of cool).

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Just think, higher budget absolutely loaded with CGI this could have great. I know people like practical special effects but I'm a CGI lover, sorry. The story was great but show the evil as mythical creatures with killer CGI and.... Wow what a story.

The basic premise of this movie is that a young couple are on vacation in the woods when all the lights go out, so they spend the rest of the night in the dark discussing "the terrortory," the portion of woods they are in that is full of urban legends. This is the frame story for all the other stories told (titled Gotz) and it definitely does not end up where I thought it would, with the final minutes including one of the best sets of lines in the movie.

The stories being told are Siren (a hunter encounters a strange woman), The Prowler (a film set has someone come shake up down time between filming), Smiling Jack (a duo of hikers are chased by a slasher), The Drone Collector (a group of hikers are chased by drones), and The Midnight Clown (a group of filmmakers are terrorized by a clown).

My favorite two stories were Smiling Jack and The Midnight Clown. I felt those were the best two executed shorts that could work as feature length films. Smiling Jack is by far one of my favorite shorts from any anthology, I considered it that amazing! As with any indie movie, some segments did have a few faults. The Prowler had audio that didn't match the other segments and was too low. The Drone Collector also had a scene of really bad audio peaking. And for a microsecond in The Midnight Clown there was a crew member crouching in the background.

Yet that is it. Everything else was great! Even the practical effects, those were incredibly well done. Especially in Smiling Jack towards the end, that had a gory sequence that was well executed.

I highly recommend giving this a watch.

Hahahahahaha. I love to see the 10/10 ratings for this movie. Don't they realize how transparent their bias is? IMDb should require reviewers to fill out a conflict of interest form, and if someone signs it and there is later suspicion that there was, in fact, a conflict, then that person should have legal action taken against them, at the most, or banned from IMDb for life, at the least. I'm making a big deal out of this because there is so much crap out there that it is really hard to wade through all the BS to find something that is vetted and worthy of my precious time. Verrrrrry frustrating. This is a 3/10 horror movie, at best. Cheesy special effects, stupid stories, low production value, just....stupid. I actually think the acting is the, ahem, bright spot in this turd. I understand that this is an independent effort but for the love of God, if this is what your final product is, then don't bother making it. If this movie were a person it would have 3 legs, 4 arms, horns, hooves and an IQ of 12.

Just don't bother.

I was trying to update items in the 'parental guide' section, but nodded off twice (despite being otherwise wide awake) and kept getting lost whenever I rewound the movie to try and find where I dozed off at since EVERY SINGLE story segment is "people hiking through the woods in daylight".

Everything looks and sounds the same.

I ended up just giving up once the clown showed up, but I'm positive I missed some stuff due to how insistent the film is in putting me to sleep against my will.

.................. MY RATING SCALE ..................

• 1. Reserved for Poorly Produced/Amateur Video
• 2. Utterly Terrible
• 3. Really Bad
• 4. Mediocre
• 5. Perfectly Average
• 6. Surprisingly Entertaining
• 7. Very Good
• 8. Incredibly Good
• 9. Exceptionally Great
• 10. Reserved for my Personal Favorites.