Worth a watch

I think a lot of you guys are being too harsh on this movie.

Normally, I rent straight-to-video horror flicks to have a good old time laughing at how horrible they often are. There's nothing quite as fun as watching a completely inept movie trudge along terribly on your home theater system.

There are two kinds, though - so bad it's good and just plain boring bad. You never know what you're gonna get.

The Murder Game is neither. I watched it hoping for a "so bad it's good" flick, but I got neither that nor the dreadful, "just plain boring bad", either. It's actually pretty good. I watched the whole thing and not because I was having fun laughing at what was going on. I watched it because I was just plain into it.

These guys know how to make a movie - they know what a movie should be, how to write one and how to put it together. Its construction had a professional feel to it - as did the way the scenes developed, etc.

I was involved in the story and had a good time watching. The movie really is better than the average horror film being put out by Hollywood. No, not technically or with the budget, etc. But with just plain storytelling and as a movie - it really is. It's much more fun to watch and coherent as a narrative.

The major flaw in the film, I think is in the breakdown of logic that seizes the characters about halfway through. The characters have done a very sensible thing - got in one place and decided to stick together until morning comes and help arrives.

But the filmmaker's, of course, have to get them split up again in order for the horror stuff to continue. This is where the otherwise logical and interesting script started to falter, as characters started abandoning the safety of their position for reasons that simply aren't anywhere close to believable considering a killer is lurking in the halls hacking people up(as far as they know).

For instance, I don't care how big a "prick" a guy was, I can't imagine anybody being so upset by the person that they'd rather take their chances out in a dark labrynthine maze containing a murderer on the loose that's already hacked up several of your friends. And I don't know anybody who'd even think of leaving that position to take a bathroom break rather than just piss their pants or in the room.

It's just not believable in the slightest.

This is a major lapse, but the movie is fun enough and entertaining enough that I didn't mind all that much.

These are filmmakers to watch and I know their future output has a chance of getting better and better.