DROPPING EVIL (2012)


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.

If you can deal with with audio and picture at some points of the movie, Dropping Evil is a fun movie to watch but don't expect to be blown away by it.
                          
                           
reviewed by Bobby

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