Trigger Man

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.

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.

Minimal script, minimal character development, minimal steady camera. Maximum stretched scenes, maximum headache inducing jerky zooms, maximum characters walking around in the woods doing nothing. Up until the time flashes on the screen of 12:01pm, you can fast forward and miss nothing, since there are three hunters who we know nothing about doing nothing. To be fair, the movie does have some string music that was interesting, so perhaps a music video would have been the way to go with this. Unfortunately that was not to be, and what should have been a twenty minute short is stretched beyond belief. Forget about "Trigger Man", I know I am trying to. - MERK

A simple story line but not gimmicky and indeed its ordinariness is what made the film interesting. Some scenes where there was no movement of any kind were too long. No doubt this was to create the sense of "ordinariness" but in actuality the situation was anything but ordinary because there were two killers lurking. The scenery was idyllic which, as with the ordinariness of the hunting trip generally, masked the evil hidden in this placid setting.

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.