The cover of the Blu-ray for this movie proclaimed that Edward Furlong is fun to watch. You'll notice this isn't really praise for the movie itself. There's a reason for that: The movie is pretty damned stupid. Furlong does create a rather unique sort of serial killer character, but there's a reason this hasn't been done before. He's a master of ceremonies who does barely any killing himself, nor does he set up elaborate traps or make contestants kill each other for the most part (which would have made more sense thematically). He has a dumb goon do the killings on his behalf. The goon never really makes any sense in terms of his motivations nor does he tie into the themes of the movie in a discernible way.
Furlong's character is presumably supposed to be a commentary on the exploitative nature of TV production. It isn't very subtle, but this is a slasher film, or at least tries to be, so I won't begrudge them that. The only other characters of any significance are the contestants, who are of course a bunch of whiny idiots who only care about being on TV and all consciously adopt personas based on previously successful reality TV stars.
This sounds clever in theory, but doesn't work in principle. This is partly because the villain mainly sits at a monitor yelling stuff into the intercom, partially because the actors are mostly bad and partially because many of its points that it seems to be trying to make about reality shows get lost in ridiculous set-ups. There are some legit criticism to be made here, but the movie mostly misses the mark. It doesn't help that I wasn't sold on its resolution either because of the writing or the the acting. I'm going to go ahead an give this a three, because the movie did seem to be making some effort to be good, just not enough.
Furlong's character is presumably supposed to be a commentary on the exploitative nature of TV production. It isn't very subtle, but this is a slasher film, or at least tries to be, so I won't begrudge them that. The only other characters of any significance are the contestants, who are of course a bunch of whiny idiots who only care about being on TV and all consciously adopt personas based on previously successful reality TV stars.
This sounds clever in theory, but doesn't work in principle. This is partly because the villain mainly sits at a monitor yelling stuff into the intercom, partially because the actors are mostly bad and partially because many of its points that it seems to be trying to make about reality shows get lost in ridiculous set-ups. There are some legit criticism to be made here, but the movie mostly misses the mark. It doesn't help that I wasn't sold on its resolution either because of the writing or the the acting. I'm going to go ahead an give this a three, because the movie did seem to be making some effort to be good, just not enough.