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Such a frustrating disappointment

Better Late Then Never

A Masterpiece!

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

The premise is very interesting. Children being experimented on and then most are never seen again. This movie follows some of those children who are now grown up. The problem with the movie is that the death scenes are too short and not enough screen time for the viewer of a true horror movie to appreciate. Flash backs would have been a HUGE plus so you could see what the children had to go through. Once again I do like the plot. The actors were fine. The directing was the problem. I think this deserves a remake where you go more in depth with characters and their ultimate demise. If you want a movie where someone lives at the end - no luck Chuck! The ending was zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz and did not play enough on the horror that these children went through. I say SKIP IT!

Another boring American horror story, this one filmed in a rambling old building somewhere in Maryland. It features a cast of has-been actors who spend almost the entire running time wandering around dimly-lit corridors while the scriptwriters attempt to make some kind of sense of a muddled and disjointed back story. Although there are a few attempts at intense scare scenes and ghostly stuff, there's no gore or real incident to speak of.Headlining the cast is Dina Meyer, formerly of STARSHIP TROOPERS fame and nowadays propping up many a B-movie. Joining her is controversial former porn actress Traci Lords whose acting is limited to say the least, Gabrielle Anwar (BODY SNATCHERS), and a bunch of middle aged guys. Needless to say the quality of the performances and the technical values are all sub-par, making this a rather pointless production.

How long these people behind Horrorfest can go on pretending that they are releasing anything but below average horror movies by marketing them as extreme, one can only guess. Crazy Eights is an awful waste of time.Six adults end up investigating their past for no good reason. They end up in some hold house and keep digging further and further until they realize they can't get out and that they are unconsciously familiar with the old house. Thanks to a misplaced intro we know everything about these people and what happened to them as kids. They don't know it. So the audience has to put up with an hour and a half of these clowns making stupid decisions that will get them in trouble so they can find out a past that we already know. Usually in these kinds of movies, they hire teens to play the characters. The difference here is that they are adults, but they still act unbelievably dumb. No one makes a single rational decision at any point.Eventually, they end up getting hurt and dying- thankfully. The movie is well filmed, with a decent cast making the most of a script that should never ever have been approved for production. Technically the movie is also well done. But what can you do if you have nothing resembling a decent story? There is near zero character development. At times this movie wants to be a ghost story with a creepy girl, at other times it wants to be one of those lame psychothrillers where the characters are screaming at each other for hours. It doesn't succeed at either. This movie has no humor, very little in terms of violence, gore, thrills. Not worth even a rental.

Being named to the After Dark Horrorfest must be a mixed bag. On the one hand, your independent horror flick gets great distribution and promotion. On the other, it gets saddled with unrealistic expectations, the result of the festival's hype about releasing films that are too scary and subversive for Hollywood. I've yet to see one of these films that lived up to these inflated expectations. Most are just variations on a theme, with CRAZY EIGHTS proving no exception.This picture offers us a combination of THE BIG CHILL and CUBE (or any number of Twilight Zone episodes about people being stuck in strange environments). A group of childhood friends regroup after the death of one of their own and find themselves stuck in the basement of an abandoned research hospital. Of course, they share a horrific secret: they were all test subjects in a psychological experiment that went awry. They hallucinate. They scream and cry. And then they run off by themselves, character after character, so they can be conveniently picked off by an evil entity.CRAZY EIGHTS is competently directed. It features a great location (who can fault an abandoned, creepy hospital?). And the actors, including former porn star Tracy Lords, do a nice job.But I was again struck by what the film didn't have: any kind of plausible explanation about the spirit infestation. Instead, we get lame J-horror borrowings. *BIG SPOILER* All this carnage was due to the spirit of one angry little girl. It's an angry little girl we hardly ever glimpse, which is a good thing in a film like this, but it's still a lame excuse for 90 minutes of supposed "terror." It's as nonsensical as its big-budget cousin, SILENT HILL, which used the same premise.Don't get me wrong, this isn't a horrible movie. But neither is it a thinking person's horror film. I'm actually confused by who its target audience was. There's so little blood that it isn't pandering to gorehounds. CRAZY EIGHTS actually goes out of its way to hide the aftermath of the ghost attacks. And even if it did want to linger on the carnage, the effect would have been nullified by the muted color palette of the film. The entire picture looks like it was de-saturated. It's an odd and pointless approach…a perfect compliment to the plot.