Simon Says (2007)

How sad is this?

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Sometimes you can follow a tried and true recipe and still fail. Simon Says is just all around badly slapped together with stereo typical, empty characters, un-unique kills, a terrible killer and all of this packaged to call out "Blake Lively" on the cover because she hit it big a year later. For the record Blake Lively is in this film a total of about 15 seconds and its in the last few minutes of the movie. The concept of twins (one who is dim witted) seems like it could be a good idea for a slasher film but Crispin Glover who tries to pride himself on being obscure and unique usually just comes across as egotistical and annoying and that shines through in Simon Says. If his character had been better written he could have maybe done something significant with it. The rest of the cast, the older than teenage fodder for the killer are terrible. They add nothing to the story or the cast. Director and writer William Dear is not a newcomer to the industry. He's been directing films for over two decades and I think someone just gave him a few dollars to do his own thing but it just feels so slapped together. Every once in awhile, if you're a big horror fan like me, you will get drawn into the story briefly, or enjoy a really gory kill but then the poor cast and story and pace will drag it all back down. Unless you're just a huge slasher fan you might as well skip this one. 5/10

oh that was fun. Laughing-so-hard-I-fell-off-my-bed type of fun. First, as one reviewer rather effectively put it: it's raining pick-axes. Well, when it rains it pours! Lovely machinery in this forest... Just a thought in passing: either Simon/Stanley spends a lot of his free time scouring the woods for his scattered pick-axes (in which case the murderous lifestyle becomes rather understandable) or he gets fined a lot for littering. Then again, he'd just pick-axe the cop's ass and be done with it, so... Still, imagine Glover's character stalking his prey in the forest, his fiercest scowl in place .... and falling flat on his face after tripping over a forgotten pick-axe. Talk about an anticlimax... Also: "if you gonna die, might as well die high." When the resident stoner bleats that scintillating piece of wisdom, one may want to murder him. Bless Simon/Stanley's little jealous heart that he does exactly that. With . A . Giant . Joint. Yep. 'Smoking will kill you' all right. in the same vein, the dog scene was hilarious. Don't get me wrong, I love dogs. Usually, cruelty to animals in movies makes me queasy, but that stomp was just too over-the-top to be taken seriously. And afterwards, when Simon (in little-boy-lost mode) appears cradling the "sleeping" dog... awww, bless, that's almost cute. For a blood-covered psycho redneck carrying around a squashed dog-corpse. You get the idea...and ... was that an eyeball stuck to the back of the newspaper ???I can't resist adding a bit about Glover's southern (?) accent: that was awful, painful, terrible ... and very, very funny. That's the bit that clinches the deal for me: the friend I watched this with says it's a failed horror movie, but with that kind of performance in it, it just has to be a parody (especially since the rest of the characters includes Generic Jock, Generic Slut, Generic Stuck-up-kid-who-dies-first and Generic Stoner... you don't stick so closely to the rules of a genre unless you want to mess with them).So, to sum it up, we have cheese, pick-axes, more cheese, a few paintball players passing through just long enough to be slaughtered gleefully (serves them right for the dog's name), a bit more cheese, and Crispin Glover who carries the show practically alone, and does a great job of it too.

The wife and I decided to rent "Simon Says" based on its particularly nasty looking trailer and the fact that we saw Crispin Glover's name above the title, prompting me to joke "Cool, George McFly as a slasher!" We knew nothing about the film prior to stumbling across it on our cable's On Demand, and thus settled in for what looked like some goofy slasher doin's.I must admit, the first twenty minutes or so of "Simon Says" were pure torture. Lord knows I've seen my share of slasher films over the years, and obviously so have the makers of this film because the first quarter of the movie sticks so closely to the "rules" of slasherdom that it almost becomes a parody. When five teens (each representing a time honored Slasher Cannon Fodder Sterotype, of course -- i.e. The Brainy Chick, the Slutty Chick, the Jock Guy, the Stoner Guy, and the Yuppie Chick) pull off the beaten path to do some camping in a near-deserted small town, it takes them no time at all to get on the bad side of local hillbilly store proprietor "Stanley" and his retarded brother "Simon" (both played by Glover), so I was already thinking "Oh man, this movie is gonna suck." The characters were cardboard cut-outs, the dialogue was howlingly bad, and the foreshadowing (of what is supposed to be a big 'shock twist' at the end, which I will not reveal here but I'm sure everyone will see coming from a mile away) was so telegraphed that I almost considered switching the movie off. I'm glad I stuck with it though, because once the 'action' finally starts in "Simon Says," gorehounds will be in for one helluva nasty, gooey, blood-covered treat. Seems Stanley/Simon is quite handy with pickaxes and has booby-trapped the woods with some very original contraptions that hurl blades, gears, and other implements of death at our teenage heroes (as well as a few other bystanders who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) with lethal, often hilariously gory accuracy. It wasn't long before I was cackling as our teenaged idiot heroes were running aimlessly through the woods, being chewed to bloody stumps while Crispin Glover chewed on the scenery for all it's worth. The guy's always BEEN weird, and this movie gives him the opportunity to just go completely off the wall. He looks like he had a hell of a lot of fun in this dual role.By the tail end of "Simon Says" we even get a "dinner with the family scene" (when Stanley takes the lone surviving girl to meet "Maw and Paw" who are of course rotting corpses sitting around a table), providing another nod to many '70s and '80s exploitation/splatter movies and adding yet another level of sick weirdness to what was already a pretty sick movie. By the time this one ended my wife and I could only look at each other and laugh, and we've been making "You forgot to say Simon Says!" jokes for a couple of days now."Simon Says" is not a GREAT movie by any means but it's certainly worth a look if you haven't been getting your recommended daily allowance of carnage at the video store. It starts out pretty average but suddenly and without warning becomes its own weird and unpredictably hilarious beast.

First of all I saw this movie dubbed in German and German dubs of horror movies most of the time are ridiculous. In this case it somehow fit the plot and the characters. You get you basic horror movie setting... a bunch of teenagers go out to camp in the woods (Good one: "You know a romantic place at the river? Something dark and creepy where serial killers walk around?"). After the characters are introduced... funny stoner guy, hunky football guy, horny annoying chick, naive chick and the smart chick that is supposed to save the day... they stop for fuel and meet Sicko Stanley played by Crispin Glover. Crispin plays the two brothers Stanley and Simon who are the same person after all because Stanley turns out to be schizophrenic and playing the role of his dead brother Simon (whom he obviously killed like everyone else). So when they get to the camping site the usual serial killer story unfolds. That is packed with as many clichés as the opening of the movie. Girls fall down when fleeing the killer, stoner guy walks into a freezer with corpses, hunk guy gets mixed up between two girls and Stanley walks around, killing people with his crazy pickaxe catapult, stomping dogs, stabbing people, building funny dwarfs out of corpses and having a relaxing dinner with his dead rotting parents. A lot of this stuff is absolutely ridiculous, Stanley seems to have supernatural powers when pinning people to trees with pickaxes and making a human shishkebab. Some party made me laugh and reminded me of the Freddy Krueger Horror-Fun like when stoner guy is killed with a giant spliff and then set aflame. Anyway, the acting of all involved is pretty medium and the movie is not horrifying at all, although there really is some gory stuff in there. To me it came across like an extremely clichéd horror comedy that in many scenes made no sense at all (for example the dead horse woman pointing somewhere) and was stolen from loads of movies you know anyway.