Reality Kills

Horror View Review
Take seven of the most different stereotypes imaginable, throw them in hickville and add a killer. That’s Reality Kills for you. Here’s the rundown; prissy blonde sheltered girl, white trash pirate radio rebel guy, overly stated yoga/martial artist/tai chi master Japanese girl, bisexual fashion mogul goth dude, thoughtful introverted brunette chick, hardcore ghetto gangsta would-be guy, and Latina dreadlock rich bitch.

This could be the cast of any Big Brother or Real World, except that every character is totally overblown and amplified past the point of realism. Add in Bogey, the creepy groundskeeper, Brock the rapper host, the limey cameraman, and a couple of hot boom girls. The whole group is thrown into a house where a bunch of people killed themselves during an orgy in the Liquid Sky massacre.

The characters each reveal their personalities quickly, meaning that the Crash Man (DePriest), aka white trash pirate radio moron guy, is annoying from the moment he’s on screen. The filmmakers recognize the limitations of the set-up, and put the girls in panties as quickly as possible. The film also wastes no time whacking people, which is a blessing, given the other option of more exposure to the characters.

It takes no time at all for off-camera events to start setting up each of the supporting characters as the potential killers. Brock is an arrogant prick trying to ramp up the intensity of the show, and he’s into bondage. Other than coming off as a complete inbred, Bogey doesn’t do a damn thing. Meanwhile, tension builds and friendships form among the cast.

None of the acting jobs is terrible, but each is written into such a targeted stereotype that there’s little flexibility. Given this limitation, several of them do a very good job at making the character their own, including goth boy Gar (Dushku) and Brock (Fingaz). Of course, it’s each actor playing themselves playing another part, which makes a nice tongue-in-cheek on some levels. Once the bodies start falling and everyone starts wigging out, the dialogue ramps up with some good one-liners. The action shots and soundtrack, however, take a step back toward cheese.

The killer’s wardrobe and modus operandi make him one of the least appealing horror villains in recent memory. If not for the tie-in to the Liquid Sky cult, the murderer would just be a re-enactment of 1982’s comedy/mystery Private Eyes, with Tim Conway and Don Knotts.

The bit part of associate director is played by Kristen Miller, whose resume’ includes “She Spies” and “That’s My Bush!”. Poor thing. She gets a whopping 45 seconds to herself but makes the most of it. Nate Dushku is, of course, the brother of Eliza Dushku, best known as Faith in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.

Sure, readers may think this whole thing was done before with bigger names and a bigger budget in Halloween: Resurrection. Still, the intrigue of an unknown killer, more nudity and cute chicks, and the chance for some unknown actors to make a name for themselves gives Reality Kills a better result. Not that that’s exactly aiming high.

Fright Review

REALITY KILLS

I’m sure there exists a great horror movie about the reality TV phenomenon.  REALITY KILLS, however, isn’t it!

The Package      This 2002 film, which plays off the formula of BIG BROTHER and other recent reality television programs, at least has an impressive pedigree.  It was co-produced, appropriately enough, by John Langley, the creator of COPS, which is viewed by many as the show that kicked off the reality trend.  The director was the talented (though highly erratic) Canadian Rafael Zelinsky, whose many low budget feats include SCREWBALLS (1983) and FUN (1994).  As for REALITY KILLS’ largely unknown cast, the less said the better!

The Story
     TRUE LIVIN’ is a top rated reality TV program in which seven people are pitted against each other in an isolated setting.  For TRUE LIVIN’S latest season, the locale is an isolated barn where a past massacre is rumored to have taken place.
     Among the twentysomething contestants are the wannabe actress Serendipity, the DJ Crash, the lesbian Gar and the apparently virginal Charlotte.  All initially clash, and than the gals begin pairing off with the guys--all but Charlotte, who it seems will remain forever a virgin, and Crash, who nobody can stand.  The latter is inevitably voted off in the first elimination round, and isn’t at all happy about it!
     But then the body of a cameraman is found hanging in the barn, and chaos takes over.  Everybody begins turning on everybody else as suspicion for the killing runs rampant and paranoia takes over.  In the meantime more bodies are discovered.  Clearly one of the participants (or possibly even two) is responsible...and the body count continues to rise.

The Direction      The biggest problem with this shot-on-handheld-video production is that it emulates its real life forebears (BIG BROTHER, etc.) too closely.  This means all the characters are annoying twerps with whom it’s impossible to sympathize.  Nor does the film improve any once the killing starts; it turns from an irritating gab fest into an even more grating BLAIR WITCH-like swirl of screaming and shouting, with a “surprise” ending that’s not especially surprising or satisfying.
     Rafael Zelinsky is capable of far better than this.  The pic, aside from satirizing reality television, is very much in the mode of the hipper-than-thou SCREAM films, with constant nods to past horror movies (including a somewhat witty BLAIR WITCH reference).  The results are dull and irritating by turns, but never especially scary or entertaining.

Popmatters

'Reality Kills': The Slasher Movie Gets House-Broken

By Phil Mason 31 March 2013

Given its reliance on effect to keep its audience satisfied, the genre that probably has the most in common with reality TV is horror. 

As early in cinema history as Conrad Veidt staring-down the viewer in Dr. Caligari, scary movies have never had a problem with taking a brain-flecked sledgehammer to the fourth wall. At the same time, the horror film’s exploitation of its audience’s latent voyeurism means that it’s always going to occupy a ghetto roughly adjacent to its hidden camera cousin. Invariably, fans of both want it cheap, they want it anonymous—relatively well-known faces but no stars—and above all they want it messy.

This is something that both film and TV producers cottoned on to quickly, and in the last decade or so we’ve seen any number of crossovers, from Halloween: Resurrection to Ghost Hunters. To be fair, none of these have exactly set the world on fire, presenting as they do the very image of form over content. However, very few can have been as bad as Reality Kills (aka The Burningmoore Incident).

Taking the form of a faux true crime documentary, the film centres around James Parrish, a family man who, five years before the ‘show’ in question, murdered his wife and children before seemingly disappearing into the aether. Via a series of interviews, we learn of his apparent lack of motive other than an obsession with Greek mythology—something that, prior to the killings, had found its most obvious expression in the word Moros tattooed on the back of his head.

With the background exposition safely out of the way, the action moves to the property in Queens, where the original murders took place. It’s been standing derelict for five years, giving a TV company the opportunity to move in and film an episode of their home makeover showGettin’ Hammered. This, rather inevitably, turns out to be a mistake. James is still sniffing around—and as a local creepy homeless guy says, it’s never stopped being his house.

There are two of massive and linked flaws in Reality Kills. The most apparent problem is that beyond a vague god complex, we never learn enough about James Parrish to make him interesting as a villain. 

Director Jonathan Williams has said that when it comes to horror, what fascinates him is when ‘real people’ do bad things out of the blue, which is fair enough. The x-factor that makes his obviously-favourite films so compelling though is the way they poke around in their monsters’ respective psyches. In Reality Kills, Parrish stands in direct contrast to Hannibal Lecter and John Doe—characters of such psychological depth the audience actually struggles not to empathise with them. (It doesn’t help that Parrish—inexplicably played by Geoff Tate out of Queensryche—is generally shown via camera shots so long or grainy you can barely even tell that it’s him).

The lack of meaningful context in relation to the murderer is reflected elsewhere. The pre-credit warning to the audience is clearly a nod to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the next scene—a couple murdered while about to go at it in the abandoned house—a less than deft pastiche ofFriday the 13th. By the massacre at the end meanwhile, you’re looking at an awkward cross between The Toolbox Murders and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. In other words, rather than building a convincing narrative, the movie attempts to fly held together with little more than a string of arbitrary references. 

The dangers of this approach are obvious. Parrish notwithstanding, it’s difficult to feel much for any of the characters, given that none of the victims are any less of a cipher than he is. This in turn inevitably has a knock-on effect on its success as a horror film, because if you don’t care about the people on screen at all, it’s difficult to feel that much dread at the prospect of their not-nearly-bloody-enough demise

 Full Movie on YouTube