Trigger Man

When people say there is nothing but walking around for a good hour, this is not an exaggeration. In fact, it may be too generous, because for about five whole minutes the three hunters sit and do absolutely nothing. I thought the screen had frozen and so did the person I was watching it with. But no, they just weren't moving. And this is LONG before there is any "action" so it's not like the film is building tension.

Unfortunately, when the action finally begins the viewer may have been literally lulled to sleep and it's blink-and-you-miss.

The movie takes much too long to get going and when it does the characters just make stupid choices. It's an Idiot Plot. There is a lot of shaky cam and inexplicable cuts that make it impossible to know what is going on. I know this is going for the Blair Witch kind of feel, but the movie takes too long to do anything or build any tension so rather than feeling nervous at the shaky parts, you just tune out.

The characters are non-entities. It felt like the actors weren't even giving an effort, and I can't really blame them. I remarked to my companion that this seemed like a first year film school student thing. An "A" for effort kind of thing for whoever made this. Nice try buddy, I'm sure you'll make a good movie next time.

Anyone acquainted with contemporary horror likely knows of Ti West and knows what he's capable of putting together in terms of making horror films. He can take various setups and proceed to fill them with characters, atmosphere, and an impending sense of dread in order to effectively adhere to the basic principles of the horror genre. Trigger Man, made on a dirt-poor budget in 2007, concerning three men (Reggie Cunningham, Ray Sullivan, and Sean Reid), who embark on a hunting trip in Delaware where they soon become the target of a lethal sniper lurking in the woods, seems like the perfect premise for West to execute his suspense-driven ways. However, he focuses too much on inherently-inert suspense, which comes in the form of the hunters walking around a cluttered forest to the point of excess; West essentially traps himself within the confines of his own suspense that any form of payoff inevitably becomes a "too little, too late" circumstance.

West does it all with Trigger Man, from being the film's writer, producer, director, editor, and cinematographer, and the film gives off the impression it was shot amongst pals during a weekend getaway. The continuity is all over the place, the camera-work is frequently unsteady, the editing feels sloppy, and the sense of dread is shockingly minimal. The film's glaring error, alongside the fact that the suspense comes in excess, is that West doesn't allow any sort of spacial element to take fold. We never really get the sense of, despite the vast open spaces around them, how trapped these characters are. We don't get the idea of the environment because we're so busy lingering on our empty characters with medium-length, unsteady shots, and with a film that takes place almost entirely in a woodsy setting, the environment is a key aspect. The forest is a lifeless character, complimented by the three leads, absent of any and all personality.

There's a brilliant horror film fighting to reveal itself in Trigger Man, but as it stands, the film is too slight to recommend and too unremarkable to commend on the same level as other West films. This is an interesting effort, combining the most minimalistic levels of storytelling devices, narrative progression, and payoff to create a horror film stripped down to its bare basics of operation, but it's all too shaky and uniformly messy to praise when there are other efforts of the like that do so much better at conveying dread and suspense (the underrated Open Water, anyone?). The good thing is with West's strong filmography, this one will live on as a footnote and its long term impact clearly hasn't worked to stall what looks to be a long, fruitful career.

Starring: Riley Cunningham, Ray Sullivan, and Sean Reid. Directed by: Ti West.

"Trigger Man" is definitely the most boring and silliest movie I've ever seen in my life. My aunt's holiday videos are more fascinating.

The actors seem to be recruited at uglypeople.com. They do not have any talent to act in a convincing manner.

They walk and walk and walk through the forest. There's more walking-around than in all three parts of "The Lord of the Rings" together. After the first hour, I began to read a Porsche brochure while watching "Trigger Man" along the way. Awful.

A total waste of time and money. I'd give that movie 0 stars out of 10, since this is not possible, I have to give 1 star.

available on Netflix Instant, with a 90% RT rating, 80-minute runtime, fun premise, what have you got to lose? too much, more than a straight-to-internet genre curiosity has any right to take. I guess the big thing about this movie is that it BUILDS TENSION. and it does, for 30 seconds or so. then it spends another 30 seconds killing that tension, and then several minutes beating its corpse. It's shot 'documentary-style' - except they've chosen to mimic the raw footage used to make a documentary, rather than an actual film. so it's more youtube-style, really. even the beginning of the film, before there's any conflict, there are endless sequences of characters doing nothing. sometimes the time pops up on the screen, not in the corner like a crime serial, but the screen goes black and displays the time of day for us. who the ---- cares? we're following one character around in a forest! why remind us of how long we've spent watching it? there are a few occasions where something actually happens in the film, none of them notable. this was the longest 80 minutes of my life.

For the second time in a round, I was underwhelmed by a Ti West Movie. Now, there are things that I liked, but there's a lot that I didn't like.

Positives for Trigger Man (2007): The movie is well shot for the most part. Much like The Roost (2005), I appreciate that Ti West gave this movie a grindhouse feeling.

Negatives for Trigger Man (2007): I didn't really care about the characters in this movie much like in The Roost (2005). There's a long stretch of the movie where I was kinda boring up until the ending. The ending was underwhelming because I was hoping for something more brutal, but then again the movie had a small budget and I'll give Ti West some credit for doing his best.

Overall, Trigger Man (2007) is a movie that I appreciate more than I enjoyed.