Review: Horrorvision (2001)

1 out of 5 stars

Big budget films that go through several scripts, several script rewrites, several directors, and several casts generally fail at the box office. Small budget films, as a rule, avoid this fate: they are usually directed and acted by the persons that dreamt them up. Horrorvision seems to be the microbudget exception to this rule.

You can find references to the film littered throughout late-90s Videozones from other Full Moon films. Originally titled Fear.Com, the film was to be directed by Charles Band himself. After a year or so, it was rewritten as Horrorvision.Com and handed to J.R. Bookwalter to direct after he finished shooting Witchhouse 2: Blood Coven. Why Band would hand money over to someone who put out that drivel is beyond me.

The story only gets longer: Bookwalter was also supposed to direct the second entry into Band's "classic horror revisited" project, entitled Mummy Resurrection or some nonsense. Bookwalter decided to rewrite Horrorvision.Com, and he and on e of his Tempe Entertainment cronies came up with dreadful script that finally found its way to DVD. No longer wanting to direct the film, Bookwalter turned over the reins to young Tempe post-production prodigy and former Full Moon webmaster, Danny Draven. Really, if you want more info on this story, you can check out the "making of" featurette on the DVD; but, you'll have to sit through both Bookwalter and Draven spouting off about their previous self-financed short films.

So, on with the movie: Horrorvision is a technology-is-bad-and-computers-can-kill-you derivative. After a website eats up his girlfriend and girl friend, our hero, Dez Draven, sets about ruminating and driving around. He encounters the film's Matrix derivative, Bradbury, sitting on his car, and they go on some adventures to find the girls and kill the techno-baddie. They are attacked by two robot-coputer things, and some poorly done gore is attempted by the EFX crew, and the movie then ends, unresolved. It ends abruptly, actually, like they ran out of money.

As for the adventures of Dez and Bradbury, let's just say that 30 of the film's 70 minutes are taken up by driving around in a convertible. Each driving trip consisting of one Trent Reznor ripoff song and some accompanying footage of passing mountains, factories, trash, one horribly inept beating, and finally, the desert.

The drive to the desert is particularly long and we're never told why they've gone out there. The car runs out of gas, so they set off on a tedious hike in which the movie is explained to us through a series of bad Star Wars jokes and fake tech-speak. After a confrontation with a techno-monster who just sort of stands in one place flailing his wire arms around, the movie ends.

Did I mention the goth angle? Ah, thought not. You see, Dez and his girlfriend, Dazzy, are goths! The first third of the film is all about their little goth conversations and their visit to a goth store. If we do some rough calculations, we find that 20 minutes of goth and 30 minutes of driving around is about 75 percent of the movie.

Unfortunately, while Bookwalter has not reared his creative drivel in the new incarnation of Full Moon, Draven has edited all three of the new films, and is responsible for the hatchet jobs on Tomb of Terror and Horrific!.

Other Reviews: Flipside, ColdFusionVideo.