Malevolence (2004)

So much average

Powerful

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Trusting some good reviews here I went ahead and watched Malevolence not expecting anything great but just looking for some entertaining slasher movie. If you add some imagination the very beginning of the movie might be quite intriguing, but once the actual plot develops it just annoys the hell out of you. The acting is miserable, the storyline is so predictable and shallow that there were some parts when I thought well?...maybe it's supposed to seem predictable and there's going to be some cool and unexpected twist now...Uh.Okay. Perhaps now?..No?..So I naively kept expecting and kept being constantly disappointed. Oh, and I must say I did jump out of my seat a few times - but not because I was scared, it was because of the music effects that can give you a serious headache. All in all, could have been an OK movie if it wasn't for pathetically poor acting and a storyline a ten year old kid could write.

This movie has a lot of mixed reviews so I thought I'd review it and have my say.First off this is your average slasher movie which as far as slasher movies go is not that bad a movie, it's very similar to a lot of other movies I have seen and your not going to get anything new here although if you enjoy the 'texas chain saw massacre' type of movie then you will enjoy this one too. The characters in the movie are played OK and I've seen a lot worse in my time, they do justice for this type of B movie and budget. The story is predictable and you'll know whats going to happen a lot of the time but I feel movies like this are more about blood and cuts rather than making you think a lot. Overall it's not bad and will pass a couple of hours on a night, it wont win any awards but as far as this type of slasher movie goes its not bad

In between the backwoods, slasher & maniac sub-genre effortlessly navigates this great indie horror film whose only failure is its very generic choice of title.The plot is minimal, like most great horror movies by the way, and reminds of another recent movie, "Freak". Both are obviously very influenced by raw horror from the late 70's and early 90's. Much like "Freak", the unlikely heroines here are a middle-class mother and her child, thrown into a cavalcade of horrors in the middle of nowhere because of an unfortunate encounter with felons. Even the ending was similar.No, 20 minutes of exposition is not too much. My beef would rather be the ending, which genuinely felt like padding, and the last-minute twist, that's completely out there. The soundtrack can feel outdated at first, with an electronic theme and belching strings that come right out of your early 80's slasher, but retrospectively, that was probably the point.For the obviously restricted budget, I never once felt ripped off and the director made the most of what he had. The tension left me riveted to my screen and I never once wandered off to the kitchen to grab a smoke, which I guess is the best compliment I can make to a movie. True horror connoisseurs will appreciate.

A bank robbery goes awry for the four who committed it, three of them meeting at an abandoned farmhouse planning to distribute the loot equally. Julian(R Brandon Johnson)is convinced by his girlfriend, Marylin(Heather Magee)to assist her recently paroled ex-con brother Max(Keith Chambers)and his colleague Kurt(Richard Glover)in a robbery so that he could pay off debts to loan sharks. Max in gut shot, as Julian and Marylin drive in hysterics to a farmhouse in the middle of a rural location. Kurt is in another car, with the loot, when his tire flattens. In desperation he confiscates the van of a woman, Samantha(Samantha Dark), kidnapping her and her daughter, Courtney(Courtney Bertolone). Arriving at the farmhouse first, he momentarily binds the females, but Courtney frees herself. This is when Kurt follows her to an old meat / poultry slaughterhouse, closed down in the 70's. This is where we discover that a killer is in the midst. Once they bury Max, Julian and Marylin are in for a rude awakening, as Kurt is nowhere to be found, only a bound Samantha wanting to find her daughter.Slasher flick with not one original idea. Just a series of story elements derived from a variety of sources, from the killer's look(..sack over head, taken from Kurt, reminding us of Jason Voorhies from Friday the 13th Part 2), to the musical score which has plenty of Carpenter's Halloween in how it sounds. Ed Gein's back story is used for the killer's background as is Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There's really not a lot of plot, with most of the movie over by the half-way point due to such a limited set of characters. I mean, Max is dead within fifteen or so minutes and Kurt doesn't last much longer. That's kind of disappointing since the film's villains decrease a bit too quickly with only the boring psychopath remaining to lurk in the shadows, in the distance, with plenty of creaking doors and characters moving throughout areas looking for what caused a noise. Julian is established as a rather likable young man who got caught up in a situation due to a number of mistakes, including being influenced by Marilyn, so he's not much of a threat. And, Marylin, although she barks orders, isn't that imposing as a villain, either. Then you have this long-winded finale after the big chase scene where the remaining survivors attempt to flee their pursuer, and we get to understand what caused the killer to act the way he does, which hearkens us back to Hitchcock's Psycho. Good rural locations and ominous decaying buildings for the killer to hide are one of the movie's lone assets. The cast is merely adequate. Not much worthy in recommending to slasher fans since there's no real visceral(..the violence is cut away from, the knife never shown being buried into the bodies of his victims) or cheap thrills(..only two women important to the plot and neither is really a floozy or a character normally expected to undress) present.