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Roulette |
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It's the
end of the party and a couple of friends
decide to kill time by playing Russian roulette.
At first it seems like a fun idea but when someone
dies, the game quickly becomes reality. A year later,
most of the friends have gotten over the incident,
but the boy who died hasn't. They soon realize that
the spirit of the guy who died is back to kill them
at the exact same time that they were supposed to die
in the Russian roulette game.
Roulette gives the word "low-budget" a new meaning.
This psychological horror-thriller was shot on a
budget of only 500 dollars, and it still looks
better than many of the DTV horror flicks that
I've had to sit through. The editing is impressive
to say the least and the director uses several
interesting angles to spice things up. Yes, when
it comes to the technical part, this is extremely
well done. Unfortunately, the plot and the pacing
was a completely different story.
This 100 minutes long movie is really divided into
two stories, which of the first one really didn't
need to be more than a short opening scene. I guess
the director wanted us to get to know the characters
before they get killed off one after the other. Why
he'd want this I don't know since all of the
characters were completely dislikeable and pretty
much deserved to die.
Anyway, so on with the story. Roulette seems to think
that it's a very genuine and original movie and
almost tricks the viewer into thinking so as well.
But really, this is nothing else but a quite generic
ghost slasher flick (like Long Time Dead). An
innocent boy gets killed due to a couple of friends,
they decide to cover it all up. One year later
someone starts killing the friends off one by one.
This sounds like any other late 90's slasher flick
really, doesn't it?
Luckily, the end twist (which was pretty predictable),
did manage to save the movie from feeling like a
complete rip-off. I believe there's a good movie in
here somewhere and I really did want to like it, but
the pacing was just so slow and while there were
some scenes which had the potential to be really
scary, the sound effects just ruined it. Instead of
a "jump out of your seat BAM" effect, we got, well,
nothing really. I'm sure that the people behind this
movie will come a long way since it's obvious that
they're talented. With a better script and a higher
budget, these guys would be well on their way.
Some blood coughing (sounds weak but it's really
quite a nasty death scene).
I wish that there had been more sound effects in
here. We do get a whole lot of cheap sounding punk-
rock music though and some electronic music. It
was all decent I guess.
While Roulette is technically very impressive, it
suffers from a slow pace, an unoriginal story, and
dislikeable characters. It's a decent ghost story
but won't leave a mark in your memory. Hopefully,
these guys will get more money for their next full
length horror film, and hopefully, it won't be
quite as long. Know your limitations.
Review By: AnthroFred
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