Crazy Eights (2006)

Why so much hype?

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

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.

"Crazy Eights" is a potentially good movie undermined by a lot of flaws.**SPOILERS**Following a friend's death, friends Jennifer Jones, (Dina Mayer) Father Lyle Dey, (George Newbern) Gina Conte, (Traci Lords) Beth Patterson, (Gabrielle Anwar) Brent Sykes, (Franky Whaley) and Wayne Morrison, (Dan DeLuca) who have known each other since childhood, gather together to go through the belongings left to them. Despite being initially apprehensive, they go out to an isolated cabin where everything is located and set about looking through the valuables, eventually discovering a strange facility located within. Trying to understand how everything fits together, they realize that all of them were involved in a top-secret project that had experimented on children, including them, and that someone is still there trying to get revenge on them, forcing them to race to find it's secret and stop it.The Good News: There wasn't a whole lot to like with this one. The fact that it starts off with a potentially-promising premise that sounds pretty cool and should-be fun to occur. It's quite unique, about the experimentations going on and it does have a ring of plausibility about it, one of those areas that could've happened in the past and really could've been done, making it all that much better. The fact that the locations on display, when we can see them, are pretty creepy is a plus. The giant bunker underground looks really creepy when we get to see it, being large, spacious and, in one of the highlight moments where we follow one of them who goes in circles trying to get out only to arrive back at the same spot, is inspired and ingenious, full of great shots and really makes for one of the creepiest times in the film. Another minor one, where the professor has the flickering images pop-up on the video-screen after the classroom lecture is really nice, considering it's unknown what's happening then and it doesn't take an eternity to get through like the others shortly after. The last good plus here is the fact that there's some nice deaths in here, when it gets around to knocking them off. One is impaled through the neck with a spear-on-the-wall, another is stabbed with a glass shard, one has their leg broken in a fall down stairs, one has a windowsill closed on their neck and another rips their eyes out, so this one has some gore. Otherwise, it's all that's good here.The Bad News: This one here can only be called a major disappointment, as there isn't too much good stuff here. One of the many problems is that there's hardly any real interest going on at the beginning of the film concerning what's going on. Despite the fact that they meet together to discuss the funeral, yet it's just so dull and lifeless that it hardly gets anything going. From an abundance of failed scares, such as whatever was happening to the sculptor as that scene lasted an eternity while she kept smoothing out a piece muttering to herself yet not once was there a clear revelation of what she was making or why that was a scary situation to be in, or the haunting of the priest in the rectory as he spent another eternity searching for something making noise off the distance, yet because of the way it's edited, it appears that he's looking for the source of the music playing over the scene. That the film then proceeds to spend close to ten minutes with them all talking to each other about the significance of it, with no resolution only to suddenly throw out an idea that no one made a trail to so that it seemed logical, and then even more wandering around in an area so dark it renders the hopeful-suspense moot before finally finding the underground bunker that leads to even more time wandering around. Half of the movie is literally devoted to wandering around the different locations spouting off the same thing about trying to find out why they're there and what it all means. This makes it incredibly difficult to get into the film and take anything about it in any way, shape or form seriously, meaning the whole thing is just deadly dull. Another big flaw here is the film's lack of explanation for what exactly happened at the bunker in the finale. The film just had a bunch of actions carried out, including some gruesome deaths, then just ended without really saying what happened. It makes no clues as to whether it was a ghost, one of them, or what, and the stopping suddenly without explanations tactic isn't comforting. The last flaw to this one is that, because of the amount of time spent elsewhere, most of the big revelations concerning the story occur at the very end. The reason for naming the group as such, what happened to them to get to know each other, what was happening to them, left unexplained until the last half-hour of the film, rendering them of their importance and making it seem as though the film had forgotten about them. It's not a good feeling to have, and these here are what's wrong with the film.The Final Verdict: This wasn't all-out bad, as there's a nice amount of potential on display, but fails mainly into the disappointment area. Really only seek this one out if you're a fan of the cast or feel the need to complete the series, otherwise those who know this isn't something for them are advised to ignore.Rated R: Graphic Language and Violence

This movie is the most stupid movie I have ever seen. Why would 6 white collar workers break into an abandoned house looking for a girl that ran past their car? Then add that they break into the basement looking for this girl? Then the door to the basement slams shut and they are stuck. Why did they throw the chest out the barn window? They intentionally smashed the chest why? Nothing makes sense in this movie.I am warning you that this movie is a waste of time. Why do they feel guilt? I think they feel guilt for making this movie and they now feel compassion for the people that paid money to rent it or worse those who bought this movie.