Truth told, Scout Taylor-Compton is one of my guilty pleasures. Her acting is mediocre at best and cringeworthy enough to throw-out your neck at worst. I adore her anti-Hollywood aesthetic and white-trash tattoos and unashamedly watch anything she is in. With They Turned Us Into Killers I finally had my Scout Taylor-Compton limits pushed, however. This is by far Scout's absolute lowest point and makes her leaked sex tape look Oscar worthy.
They Turned Us Into Killers is the sequel to Room 9: a film that at the time of this writing has a solid 2.0 IMDB rating. They Turned Us Into Killers isn't so much an actual sequel as a retread of Room 9, only with worse acting and pacing. They Turned Us Into Killers is mostly filler, flashbacks and unused footage from Room 9 and plods along so slowly it will work your last nerve. The dialogue and exposition are so redundant I thought the same scenes were repeating or that my file was corrupted. I'm convinced there was no script and 99.9% of this movie was improvised and all first takes used.
In a time when there is free video editing software to tweak your movie into a somewhat watchable film, They Turned Us Into Killers manages to look bad, has terrible lighting, editing, "acting", scenery, and a three-minute plot dragged to feature-length. In fact, the same barn interior seems to play a few different locations without ever once being dressed differently.
Taryn Manning must've owed someone a lot of money to appear in this cinematic masterpiece because she delivers her lines like she had no direction, no notes, no motivation, had no idea where she was and had never acted before. And my dirty little secret Scout, well, she's just Scout and does what Scout does in horror movies: screams, runs around, rolls her eyes and overacts. The rest of the cast must have been picked up at the local Walmart at 3AM and worked for cheese sandwiches.
At 1 hour and 26 minutes I felt like I was watching a really bad three-hour epic and kept checking the runtime hoping this movie was almost over. After 5 separate attempts to finish this film I had to turn it off to preserve my sanity and moved it to the recycle bin. Right now They Turned Us Into Killers has a generous 3.7 IMDB rating, but with more viewings I'm certain it will dip below Room 9's envious 2.0 rating.
Skip it and work on your Origami instead.