Dropping Evil (2012)
Summary: After
his friends slip him LSD on a camping trip, ultra-nerdy Nancy
hallucinates that they are evil beings and begins to systematically
hunt them down. Meanwhile, a mysterious corporation monitors the
entire event for their own hidden purpose.
The plot of this movie sounds awesome
right? It reads like something coming straight out of the mind of
Lloyd Kaufman. I was actually a bit surprised from the start that I
didn't see a Troma logo at the top of the disc. Regardless, I was
looking forward to watching this. Everything about this screamed
Indie horror so I was fairly confident I knew what I was getting
myself into. Boy was I wrong.
What I was expecting to be an Indie
film was more like a “I have a camcorder and friends, let's make a
movie” kind of film. I understand this genre doesn't give film
makers a huge budget to with but the best Indie film makers know how
to use what they have. That wasn't the case here. This movie
frequently went out of focus as the camera tried to pan around and
stay with what is going on. The audio was horrible. I'm fairly
certain that the audio was recorded through the mic built into the
camera, which I have nothing against. I've seen movies where this
was the case and again, as long as the film maker knows how to do it,
it can be effective. With this film, it wasn't. As the actors were
moving around, the audio was get louder or fade away. If they they
turned their backs, the sound would fade. One really hard scene to
watch was a conversation between two of the characters that took
place in a locker room shower. Anyone who has ever been in a shower
knows that the sound echoes which made the conversation between the
two very hard to follow.
The characters were predictable which
isn't a bad thing. There's Mike and Samantha (the couple) who are
going camping. Samantha invites her single friend (Becky) and wants
to hook her up with one of Mike's friends and he ends up inviting
Nancy and yes, Nancy is a male. Nancy isn't just a nerd as the
summary suggests, but he is a religious zealot who openly preaches
his disdain for sin, namely, premarital sex. Now I don't have a
problem with the principal of this character because it fits very
well into the direction of the story. I did however have a problem
with the appearance of this character. He's suppose to be 18 years
old, still in high school. He wears a t-shirt that says “God's #1
Fan.” Yet he has random tattoos covering both forearms. His left
arm is just random skull and crossbones everywhere. Not good ones,
but skulls none the less. I find it hard to believe that an 18 year
old “Jesus freak” would cover his forearm in skull tattoos. If
these are the actors tattoos (and by the quality of them, I REALLY
hope they are not) than the character should have worn a long sleeve
shirt to cover them to enhance the believability of the character.
If they are drawn on for the character specifically, than they make
no sense.
There's another character named Mr. H.
who has two other female characters that seem to be affiliated with
him but there point in the story is really not explained at all.
They have very little screen time but it seems like they are rivals
to Valucorp (the mysterious corporation mentioned in the summary).
The dialogue between characters
actually isn't bad, at least during the parts you can hear.
Partially cheesy but funny, basically it was exactly what is
expected. The story had a lot of loopholes and weird moments.
Michael for example, doesn't seem to be a bad ass by any means but
near the end of the movie we find out that he can apparently have his
neck broken and snap it back into place, he can rip a door off of a
car and wield it as a weapon. The final battle was just as confusing
and very corny. Luckily the movie didn't end there. They introduce
the Boss Man who is the CEO of Valucorp and he gives a little
flashback story which attempts to fill in the missing pieces of the
story and give some kind of clue as to what the hell was going on. I
don't really want to give this part away since this is essentially
the whole plot point but we'll just say that Nancy, Mike, Samantha,
and Becky were all part of an experiment from the day they were born.
The movie officially ends with a mock
trailer for Dropping Evil 2 which I guess is meant to fill in the
rest of the questions. It gave me the feeling that the two competing
corporations are Heaven and Hell and this whole thing is really a
battle of Good vs. Evil. The mock trailer also dropped quite a few
cameos much in the way Rodriguez/Tarantino did with their Grindhouse
series. The cameos in this one include Edwin Neal (The Hitchhiker in
Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Felissa Rose (Angela in Sleepaway Camp),
and Fred Williamson (Frost in From Dusk til Dawn). Tiffany Shepis,
who has made a pretty solid career for herself in Indie movies also
had a small role in the movie.
reviewed by Bobby
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