In this digital age of Youtube videos, streaming movies and video on demand, a movie like "A Twisted Tale" is a dime a dozen. Low budget, b-horror movies have always had an audience but it's unclear if the ultra-low budget, c-horror movies like this one has any kind of viewership whatsoever.
Ultra-low budget, c-movies are shot digitally, which means the scenes can run as long as they want without any kind of direction, point or substance. The director doesn't have to worry about burning through film so there's no thought of what may or may not be important to capture on film. These scriptless movies are not edited properly and are often riddled with sound issues, clichéd dialogue and boring improvisation. There are no camera shots, no lighting or production design. More than being ultra-low budget films, they are amateur movies.
A Twisted Tale depicts a group of camp counselors as they try to wrangle their campers, female juvenile delinquents, whom go out into the woods in the middle of the night in search of a ghostly legend called the Fire Lady. Instead of watching over their campers, the counselors decide to get drunk and party while the campers are out getting killed by the actual Fire Lady in the middle of the night. The twisted part of this tale is that the irresponsible camp counselors all live while the teen girls all die. The hungover counselors wake up the next morning unharmed and oblivious to what happened the night previous.
The movie's strengths are in one or two key moments that are dark and creepy due to very good makeup effects and lighting effects. Other than these two moments, the movie has few redeeming qualities.
This "tale" was clearly not written. The long, drawn-out scenes indicate that the director simply told the actors what was supposed to happen in the scenes and the actors improvised, poorly at that. Every scene is littered with loud, cluttered, overlapping dialogue and lines that are repeated more than once without a single cut or edit. There's a scene where a character tells a joke and in the next shot of the same scene tells the same exact joke in a different way, as if the editor forgot to do his job.
There is no hero. There are no actual defining characters. A young African American girl named Diamond is introduced and is the only character that gives a backstory as if she was going to become the hero, or "final girl," of the horror movie. However, she never makes an appearance again the entire remainder of the film. Our supposed hero, Kat, seems to be the one who makes a connection with the Fire Lady in the end in order to get her to stop killing people. However, there is little to back up her connection with the ghost. We spend a great majority of the film with a wacky camp counselor named Barb who is so overly-improvised she isn't even funny. Lasting only an hour, the movie manages to be too long because of the unnecessary and unfunny antics of Barb the camp counselor.
It's hard to see where or how this fits in the world of horror. Perhaps it's just a fan film. The lack of basic filmmaking skills and horror storytelling knowledge would suggest it's simply a fun amateur movie. The problem is that it's not fun and ultra-low budget c-movies like this one being released each year, by the hundreds, cause really good low budget independent films to get lost in the mix and suffer.
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