Beach Massacre at Kill Devil Hills

Beach Massacre at Kill Devil Hill kind of surprised me, but not necessarily in a good way. From the attention grabbing cover of a young woman in a bikini, with a knife, body, and blood, one would think this has all the classic markings of being a B level slasher flick. While it by all means is B level, it is actually less your typical teen slasher flick, and tries to take things in a more story driven direction. Unfortunately, the budget and talent just wasn't here to successfully pull off what they tried to do.

1- The cuts, transitions, and in general the editing is awful, even by B movie standards. Jarring and distracting camera cuts all through the movie, awkward dialogue with possibly some mistakes that weren't edited out correctly, loud music that doesn't cut out at the right time and drowns out the first part of dialogue scenes. Some of this stuff may have been design decisions rather than all being mistakes, but it all came off as distracting and almost unfinished.

2- the acting, while not "good", also wasn't terrible for your average indi film. Some dialogue scenes tended to draw out longer than needed and the writing was hit and miss, but I've seen worse.

3- The story tried to be something more than your typical indi horror slasher, but it just didn't all gel together very well, and came off as long winded. This movie was certainly a slow burner with a majority of the film time spent introducing characters, the plot situation and multiple different threads. While somewhat unique, it just wasn't very interesting, and while there is a twist in how the movie ends, it leaves you more thinking "ok....?" than being surprised or entertained by it.

IMO, anyone looking for some slasher movie fun will likely be disappointed, and people who are wanting a dark story will want something with more quality and meat to it.

Simple story. A single mother heads to her parents beach house when her ex husband gets out of jail for assaulting her and their daughter. She brings along a few friends and when she gets there, she finds her sister is filming a short film with a couple of people as well. Meanwhile her ex and his uncle are looking for revenge and killing anyone who gets in their way. This could have been a great thriller. It has a lot of talented people involved and they do good work. The main problem with this movie is its so imcompentently made that you cant help but laugh. Lets begin with the sound. There are scenes where there are people having a conversation and they simply play music over it. There's another scene where the mother and father are in the same room talking and the sound is completely different. Its like the mother was re- recorded (badly) in another location and it was dubbed in. The second problem is the editing. Scenes begin and end with no transition. There's a scene with three girls in a hot tub talking about nothing and there are maybe five jump-cuts. The movie is simply pieced together badly. Third, the ages of the girls varies wildly. The lead is 38 (irl) and shes playing as a girl in the mid to late 20s. Taya Parker does an OK job but shes bland and her inexperience shows. One of the worst is Deborah Funes who plays Charliee. Funes has a VERY thick accent and its difficult to understand her lines in the movie. We are also supposed to believe shes a model. (NO NO NO NO) There are others, but the rest of the cast does a good job for the most part. This could have been a lot better, but it does look great and everyone puts effort into it. A shout out to Diana Prince and Elissa Dowling who are great in the movie.

(PS) The director has the balls to plug one of his upcoming films in the movie. Im serious. The girls are sitting on a couch looking at dvds and they start talking about how great "The Mangled" is. Funny thing, the director has an upcoming movie called The Mangled and it has the same plot.....shameless. I don't know if I should be impressed or embarrassed.

I'm staying at my friends' house, and we picked this because we always watch laughably bad movies when I stay with them. It's bad, but it's the worst kind of bad. It's not even funny bad. It's just BORING. It's an absolute slog that could have been trimmed down by 30 minutes. Almost every scene drags for about 10 minutes longer than it should. Except for the little girl, the characters are unlikeable at best, and the dialogue sounds like it was written by high school boys. About 40 minutes in we forgot what we were watching.

If you're looking for a bad movie, skip this and watch something by Mark Polonia instead.

The writing and directing kill this film. The actors have very small moments, but really nothing to work with. The story line is terrible. But ultimately it's the Director that should be given a 1, for just not trying.

The "plot" here involves a woman going to a deserted beach house with her girlfriends over the same weekend that her violent ex-husband is getting released from prison. The beach house is very remote, so if something bad were to happen...

I see nothing wrong with the plot, though I would wonder why anyone would want to put themselves so out of contact, regardless of whether a violent ex-felon were suddenly looking for them.

The filmmakers here were extremely clever in convincing us that this beach house was remote. What they did was give many shots of the young women driving, and driving, and driving. Throw in some long shots of the beach, with nothing going on, with waves, and more waves, and we see that this place is really quite remote, I mean really far away, from civilization.

During some of the conversations, there were peculiar jump cuts that I could not quite understand. Since we are at the same point of view each time, it was distracting, especially when the cuts were in the middle of a sentence.

The sound sometimes also dropped off, which again made me wonder if it was intentional. It was too frequent to be just bad editing... Or was it? I think also a few people misspoke their lines, getting the phrase correct the second time. Normally, of course, this would be edited out, unless the editors thought that they did such a great job the first time that they decided to leave the whole thing in?

There is a very attractive woman (Diana Prince) who goes topless for about 30 seconds (jump cuts strung together, each 10 seconds long = 30 seconds) You can't miss it, since the lead (Taya Parker) exclaims something like "Look - She's going topless!" right beforehand. Lucky for me, otherwise I would have missed it. By that point, I was not looking. You see, while I watched this "movie," I found myself suddenly fascinated by things in my living room that I had not really appreciated before. The coffee table over the carpet, for example. I was fixating on that more and more as this "movie" played out.

Let me give them some credit, though. There was a surprise ending. Something did happen that was not expected. And a lot of women were quite easy on the eyes.

I think that this movie could have been done a lot better. First and foremost, the editing needed a lot of work.