Directed by: William Dear
Starring: Crispin Glover, Margo Harshman, Greg Cipes, Artie Baxter, Kelly Vitz, Carrie Finklea
Plot: Five college friends choose to spend their vacation debauching at the riverside. They find the perfect place to camp out, but end up crossing paths with twin brothers, Simon and Stanley. The twins then begins to knock off the campers in some extremely creative (and extremely gruesome) ways. Enjoy the splatter. Taken from www.imdb.com.
I've been doing theater bait for too long, I need to take a break an cover some direct-to-DVD bullshit for a while. So lets kick this shit off with a bang.
"Simon Says" was something I caught sight of on the shelf at Best Buy. Now this isn't the kind of movie I would've given a second glance if not for one thing: Crispin Glover.
For those who are not familiar with Crispin Glover as anything more than George McFly or that weird guy from "Charlie's Angels" I implore you to go out and watch "Willard" before I'm forced to kill you with my brain. (Stay the fuck away from "The Wizard of Gore" though, anything that advertises the use of the Suicide Girls as a selling point is destined to be utter shit.)
So anyway I went into this film expecting a bad bad movie but happily received a bad-good movie!
So anyway five tweens (composed of Stoner, Slut, Sexually Repressed Girl (With +5 Asian-ness), Douchey guy, and Selfish Girlfriend) go out to the middle of nowhere to drink, fuck, and do whatever. How they chose this location is beyond me as it seems to literally be nowhere. They encounter a creepy woman on a horse who points at them and disappears and two strange rednecks who may or may not be ghosts. Confused yet? Fuck no you aren't! Not yet...
So anyway the ghost/rednecks point the 5 children to a gas station in a town that seems to literally have no other occupants where they meet Simon, a slow-talking simpleton with a baseball cap and a shirt that says his name. After they kids openly call Simon retarded he storms off and his pleasant-natured brother Stanley comes out to greet the crew.
Stanley is about 15 times creepier than his dimwitted twin but he at least sells them some booze and gives them the location to a campsite in the middle of nowhere. Then of course 1 by one they're picked off by the two brothers using a combination of stealth and a number of pickaxes that cannot possibly exist in one place.
Everybody in this movie who isn't Crispin Glover gargles balls and loves it in the acting department. Fortunately they're really all meat for the grinder anyway, there's really no way you can feel sympathetic for a single victim in this movie as they're all dumb twats who need to be removed from the gene pool somehow. Hell, Simon and Stanley are practically the heroes of the film.
And speaking of the twin brothers, oh my fucking God. It's been a long time since a villain performance has done justice to the overly campy 80s-style slasher movie but Crispin Glover nails it solid every time. Between Simon's slow drawl and Stanley's overblown giggling plantation-owner accent you can practically see Glover's teeth marks on every piece of scenery in the movie. The man appears to be having a damn good time at what he's doing and actually does manage to play both Simon and Stanley with a goodish amount of menace.
This movie would be utter shit if it wasn't so over-the-top gory. You see, Stanley has a love of building incredibly complex murder machines with the inexplicable use of pickaxes. There's the giant saw blade made of pickaxes, the giant spinning drum made of pickaxes, the complex machine that litters the forest with dozens of spinning pickaxes, and of course the pickaxe flinging machine that works like a harpoon gun. If you're scratching your head and wondering why, then you are not alone my friend. There is easily twice the pickaxe carnage of the "My Bloody Valentine" remake with no real purpose or explanation given. Of course that adds to the surreal bizarre quality of this movie that's really where all the charm lies. There are some brutally awesome kills and some fucking morbidly bizarre things done with corpses (I will ruin neither as they are just that messed up.)
As I said, the five tweens really serve no purpose than to die which becomes obvious almost immediately by their bland uninteresting plot-lines. Fortunately some interesting things are done with this cast of misfits. The chick destined to be the "last girl" is the first one to die and the stoner proves to be the most useful member of the group. Though towards the end there's a romantic sub-plot brought up that has never even been vaguely alluded to prior. It's this sort of cavalier "who gives a fuck, more pickaxes!" approach that the director took that really makes me respect this movie for what it is: pure schlock.
They even pull a "Friday the 13th Part VI" and bring in a random group of paintballers just so Simon has more people to kill with his bizarre machines.
If you've never found yourself able to enjoy a movie that's not trying to do anything more than thrill and entertain, this movie isn't for you. In fact if slasher movies aren't your thing this probably won't change your mind. But if you enjoy schlocky off-the-wall horror comedies (or Crispin Glover) I personally recommend this. For what it is it's fucking brilliant.
I give "Simon Says" a 4 out of 5. See it, if nothing else than for Crispin Glover: Lord of the Dance
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