SHITTY FLICKS - BEWARE: CHILDREN AT PLAY

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant camp-girl penis.

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

This is just terrible. God. The "plot" (forgive me) is embarrassingly vague, as are the motivations of the characters. What's actually going on in the movie is never clearly explained, and certain characters purposely given suspicious backgrounds are never explored. The film is lazily written and very poorly directed. Worst of all, it didn’t even offer that many Wacko-Jacko bits, which is a sin ‘round these parts. So why the following enthusiasm?

I’ll get to that.

If you don't know you're in trouble by this point, you are the intended audience.

 

Let’s meet our characters.

Father and his son, Boy, are camping in the woods. Father chases Boy, screaming that he is a "human cannibal." How ironic that Boy will end up eating Father.

But up until then, it's pretty much your typical father/son trip.

The two run through the woods, screaming in father/son delight.

Father tells Boy campfire stories.

Father and Boy roast marshmallows.

Father gets caught in a bear-trap.

Chuckles and hugs all around.

For the rest of Father's life, which is approximately three days, the bear trap keeps him in place, much to his chagrin and my delight. Boy keeps Father alive for a bit, thanks to beans. Father, who is a literary professor, starts going insane-o after seeing maggots in his leg wound and begins reciting lines from "Beowulf," one of history's oldest and classic poems. Watch as it's ruined by people who fancy themselves artists.

Father's dying words to Boy are to eat him in order to survive. Boy cries for a few seconds in mourning of his father, but then quickly brandishes a bowie knife and makes a fine, smooth incision in Father's Play-Do chest. He withdraws a barbecue chicken-ish heart and raises it up, pretending to admire it, but really, the director wants the audience to see this awesomely graphic and realistic prop that probably took the FX guys all of five minutes to make.

"What's it feel like, son? Hot dogs?"

Boy smiles.

We smile.

God smiles.

The anonymous writer of "Beowulf" cries.

Boy goes on to probably eat that heart, and then his father, and then live in the woods for the next ten years. Why? Because this was the writer's first and last movie. That's why.

We then meet John DeWolfe. He is a writer who investigates aliens, or something, and his book-covers sport “garish” art featuring the “cleavages” of many women. John is driving out to Bumblefuck County, New Jersey, to help his old army buddy/the county sheriff look for his missing daughter. John brings along his annoying wife, as well as their precocious daughter.

Also there to lend a hand is Dr. Robert T. Fish. If there’s one thing that Dr. Fish is good at, it’s unemotionally responding to any onscreen developments as he blandly stands by and ultimately provides no help or expertise whatsoever.

Honestly, the movie is so dumb that it’s not even really worth getting into.

Long story short: main Boy from the beginning believes he is Grendel from the "Beowulf" and then brainwashes the town’s children into running away from their families and living in the woods where they can practice cannibalism and fasten giant caveman clubs for use in bludgeoning grown-ups.

Three cheers for access to public domain material!

Hank Hassey's greatest party to date ended with two now-infamous words: Push Molly.

John gets to the bottom of this mystery-his inspiration in solving the case suddenly kicking in after his own wife is killed and his daughter taken-and attempts to thwart the ever-growing army of Bible-thumping hicks intent on shooting this rowdy group of children who steal pies and eat people. At this precise moment, John, taking his own daughter from the herd, promptly tells the men that he will have no part in their “cleansing” and attempts to leave when one of the rednecks shoots John in the face.

It was right at this moment when I literally said, “If this movie ends with all these kids getting shot, it will be the greatest thing I've ever seen.”

God smiles again, for I am treated to an all-out assault of rednecks with shotguns versus a bunch of snotty little kids with rags for clothes and primitive weapons straight out of Tom & Jerry.

Children ranging from 8-15 years old, with no regards for their age or their ultimate status as Our Future, are shot in every orifice available to receive a bullet.

Rob Zombie's The Sandlot.

• A small boy in a Yankees cap magically transforms into a boxy still body before his head explodes, courtesy of a point-blank gunshot.
• Main Boy defiantly curses the sky gods as he is shot several times in the chest.
• Another boy is shot in the side of the head, and after realizing that the squib has been set-off, falls awkwardly to the side, the delay in reaction very noticeable. And hilarious.
• One boy is shot in the gut by a bow staff, and he clutches the arrow residing within his person as the fishing line that provided the arrow’s entrance catches the glint of the afternoon sun.
• One young girl attempts to escape and is clocked in the head with a meat cleaver. Another man approaches and very lightly "beats" her in the arm with a whiffle bat that has been painted brown in order to fool us into thinking it's wood because we're just that fucking idiotic as to not notice.
• Perhaps the greatest kill comes in the form of a small blond boy being held by his hair as a gun is slowly inserted into his mouth. The look of pure calm on his face, since the boy has probably been directed not to move whatsoever so as to not upset the squib on the back of his neck, is so laughably distracting that I want to make love to this movie.

"I look after you. I do a lot for you. If you do not help me now, I say 'fuck you, Jobu,' I'll do it myself."

The movie ends with John’s daughter having survived the sudden massacre, hidden by his crumpled body. She stands there for a little and looks around confusedly, and then the movie literally ends. I’m not sure what that ending was supposed to allude to, but you can be sure that after that finale, I really don’t care because this is the greatest movie in the entire world, that is if you skip to the second to the last chapter on the DVD and forgo all expectations of a well-executed, gut-wrenching scene, and instead watch the sloppiest massacre committed against kids since Jerry Sandusky.