A Horrible Way to Die

Well, the title ain't lying. Lots of people die in this movie, either on screen or off, and one person comes very close to dying, and all of the methods used are pretty horrible.

"A Horrible Way to Die" brings an admittedly unique spin to the serial killer movie. It uses mixed up chronology to tell the story of a woman whose boyfriend, a convicted serial killer, escapes from prison and comes back to find her, and the efforts of a new love interest to help her and keep her safe. The wacky order in which the story is told makes it feel richer than it probably is, and there are some major plot twists toward the end (up there with some of the biggest) that are handled less than delicately (you can practically hear the gears grinding at one point as the movie shifts into an entirely new direction). And stylistically it feels like a film made by a film student who's been itching to get his hands on a camera and can't control himself once he has -- the camera is always, I mean ALWAYS, moving, randomly zooming, drifting off to the edges of the frame, going out of focus. It's exceedingly annoying.

But the film does have a morbidly grim appeal to it. I can't say I necessarily enjoyed watching it, but I can say that it was memorable.

Grade: B-

A guy has a kidnapped girl in his trunk. He drives out somewhere during winter and chokes her to death. A girl assists an AA meeting. Another of the attendees introduced himself to her and slowly they begin a relationship although she's traumatized and repressed. How these two stories relate we come to find out in flashbacks as this movie progresses.

Turns out that the killer is a convicted serial killer who managed to escape while being transported somewhere. He steals cars and as the manhunt intensifies and his face is plastered all over the news, he threatens people to drive him across state lines.

The couple becomes intimate and she reveals her secret to the guy. She was the serial killer's girlfriend. She called the police on him after she followed him and discovered he had rented a storage unit to keep the bodies. But there is a twist in the relationship between her and the new guy.

A Horrible Way to Die is a good title for a horror movie, except that it doesn't have anything to do with this movie. The idea comes up somewhere when the killer asks his gf how she would like to die. But that's about it. We don't see any horrible killings. There is some after-the-fact gore, but nothing special. It's a small budget movie that doesn't look or sound like it is. Wingard knows how direct and he knows hot to tell a story. And this movie looks very nice and sophisticated. Wingard has to employ a variety of tricks to overcome the main problem- the short script. So we get a lot of different and strange camera techniques that may seem out of place but that give this film its unique tone and atmosphere. We get moving but not shaky camera, out of focus, odd placement of the camera, things in the way. And almost all of it works, except for the distracting Christmas lights that the girl for some reason has everywhere in her house. The story works, even the way it's told, the surprise. The actors all do a good job, in particular Seimetz. And the film transmits the closeness and intimacy of the characters. It's just not enough- not enough horror, not enough violence, not enough gore- after all this movie involves a serial killer.

A horrible way to die is nothing more than a horrible way to make a movie. It looks like they just blasted some lights, cranked the shutter speed and did hand-held to make an "artistic" movie. Well, there is nothing "artistic" about this, and this is coming from someone who is a huge fun of unique and original F-U Hollywood film making. I'm a huge fan of Gaspar Noe, and I appreciate directors who "break the rules." These guys do nothing but shaky hand-held the whole time, and man is it annoying! The acting and music is good, but I feel like the camera man has never operated a camera before! It's the same type of shot over, and over, and over. You couldn't beat a dead horse any more than they used out of focus shots to transition scenes, and hand-held shakiness to show hectic moments in the movie.

I could understand if they used some hand-held and shakiness, but maybe for 5 percent of the movie, not 95 percent! Even if your a film student, I don't think you'll like this. It looks like they shot it all in 3 days. The camera work is a far cry from human vision. Human's don't float their eyes aimlessly in a shaky haze. The only point of view shot is the point of view of a really bad camera man! It's like a really depressing and poorly made reality show.

Please don't compare this movie to anything Gaspar Noe has done. Gaspar Noe's camera style isn't shaky vision, it's Gaspar Noe vision, and isn't easy to replicate, as these guys probably found out. Everything Gaspar Noe does is delivered with an original and innovative sense of technical brilliance, which this movie doesn't touch with a mile long pole. Gaspar Noe films make you interested and actually want to watch the rest of the movie, not take your eyes off screen because you have a head ache.

This movie is not much more than a student film with a really nice camera and good actors. The camera work just makes it impossible to actually get into. The script doesn't really go anywhere, and there's not much suspense. The music, color grading, and acting are all decent but unfortunately, they don't know how to set up a tripod or dolly, so you have to torture yourself to see if the acting is good or not. Please invest in a tripod, or Steadicam, or just quit floating around like a film student trying to be artistic! Hand-held film making can be really awesome, but this is a very poor example. The camera-work in Blairwitch Project was better, and they didn't even know how to use a camera! Hold the camera against your head if you have to, the more points of contact the more stable. What a horrible way to make a movie.

A difficult movie to watch could be another title. At least for some this will hold true. AJ Bowen made a name for himself with other movies and has quite a few fans, though even they (most of them at least) would agree that saying "Enjoy" this movie might be a wrong word to use. It's not the time structure or the different stories that make it difficult to watch itself nor the fact, that it still is predictable, but that it is very grim, with actually almost nobody the audience can identify with. Therefor choosing AJ to play the lead was actually a very good idea, that helps the movie a lot.

The final resolution of the movie and some of the characters is too convenient and predictable as mentioned, but if you can overlook that, you will get a thriller that knows what it wants. It is beautifully shot, though that means that it looks dirty in this case and dark. If that floats your boat, you should check the movie out. Otherwise rent with care

A Horrible Way to Die was in a 3 DVD movie box presented by Night Vision. I bought two of these boxes months ago, and I started the Psycho Killers box.

The name paints a totally different picture of the film than what it truly is. Most of the actually deaths in this movie don't seem that horrible when you only see some mild gore here and there. Yes, a horror movie doesn't necessarily need that much gore, but when a movie has a title like this, you're expecting that. Also A Horrible Way To Die is a very straight-forward title, but the movie is far from it. The movie is quite short yet it's very slow. It takes too long for anything to happen, which makes it seem more like a seriously boring art drama.

The "seriously boring art drama" feel was also enhanced by the way this film was shot. While it enhanced the creepy, haunting atmosphere, it also annoyed the hell out of me. That kind of shaky shots are good every once in a while, but not all through the movie. It's not easy to look at, and therefore not easy to follow. It wasn't just the visual side that was hard to follow. Of course I don't believe in chronological narrative anymore, because breaking the story with flashbacks work most of the time, but in A Horrible Way to Die it was sometimes really hard to tell when something happened. Of course this was enhanced by the cinematography, because you can't always see the characters and what they look like, and then realise when that scene took place and all that.

The writing of this film is good though. The dialogue is as amazing as it tends to be in horror movies, it's so real. The story itself is not bad, apart from the story being so slow. The good writing can be seen in little things, like amazing twist, dialogue and whatnot. The slowness itself is not a sign of bad writing in general, but when you watch a horror movie it's frustrating when everything happens at the last minute. But the story might work well as a novel.

A Horrible Way to Die is an interesting movie to say the least. While it's not actually good and I didn't enjoy watching it, it definitely stands out from the horror movies I've watched.