A Sort of Review: Engine Trouble (aka Junior)

A few weeks ago I went to Best Buy to cash in a $25 gift card, figuring a couple DVDs would be the most practical bang. I thought it'd be fun to grab one of those classic films I've always loved but never owned, and my search stopped at the Hellraiser & Hellraiser II combo pack for a surprisingly low price. With just seven bucks to spare on the card, the options were few, save for those el cheapo "Six Thrilling Features on Two Discs!" deals. One would assume such movies are extraordinarily bad, hence their placement on a double DVD set for a mere six dollars, but since a gift card is essentially free money (with obvious limitations), my good natured optimism set in: sometimes bad can be good!

For $6.99 was Savage Sickoes, one such collection of horror movies that were bound to be so terrible they accidentally transcend the genre into the realm of comedy. I mean, they were for sale at Best Buy, so they couldn't be that bad. The price would round out my spending allotment, so I went for it before I lost the gift card altogether.

That night, my lady and I excitedly curled up under a blanket, ready to be scared, or at least entertained in some fluky way.

I selected the first film of the six, Slaughtered, and sat back to take it in.

Between the shaky camcorder resolution, cheap title lettering and instant, brusied-body nudity, I was worried I had just purchased a "backyard" porno. I'm not kidding. When the speaking roles kicked in (which had to've been done in one take each), it was apparent the camera's built-in microphone was the only audio pick-up. Bearing with it (somehow), we journeyed through puzzling plot holes, ketchup and other unspecial effects, and the most amateur overacting I've ever witnessed. And the editing! At one point, one of the actresses actually looks directly into the camera right before a scene cut.

I thought, "How did a movie this cheap and clumsy end up in my hands? It's sub-cheap. Think of how many channels it had to pass through before hitting the shelf at Best Buy! How?" I'm still perplexed and amazed.

We gave up. We couldn't waste any more time on the rest of these "films." It wasn't "so bad it was funny." It was "so bad it was discomforting." That was three weeks ago. Until that point, Slaughtered was the worst 'commercial' movie I had ever seen in my entire life.

Since nothing could be worse than Slaughtered, my lady and I were fine taking a chance on a rental called Junior. It looked like a slasher film, and even bad slasher films are usually safe enough. The plot blurb was very generic, but we weren't expecting much in that regard anyway.
I should never have opened that door.

I was dumbfounded by so many things. I'm really having trouble trying to find a starting point, here, and I feel like I'm going to lose some eloquence in struggling to explain it all. Judging by the wide license plates in the movie, it must've been shot somewhere in Europe. Something about the film grade hinted at this as well. But the actors were all speaking English with American accents. As the film progressed, however, the inflections became insanely awkward, and the vowel sounds grew increasingly "Euro." By the end of the film (a point I can't believe I made it to), we had full-blown Eastern Europe talk.

And the subject matter? Plot? Well, I can tell you it all had little relation to the synopsis on the DVD cover. And what about the character descriptions? Rule of thumb, take whatever age description they give the characters and add fifteen years. For instance, when it says "young man," think "old man." Oh, and when it refers to "beautiful" women, perhaps they meant "raging butchies."

And then there's the cover, itself. It looked pretty cool in that suggestive, "this is a slasher movie" kind of way, but the killer in the actual movie beared no resemblance to the one on the cover. The killer on the cover suggested this movie may have had some kind of budget. He has these expensive looking binocular eyepieces and a mustard colored Carrhart-ish jumpsuit. In his gloved hands is a skull-hungry pick axe.

The killer portrayed in the movie, however, has a plastic funnel obscuring his face, a cheap, gray jumpsuit, and wielding a small "sickle" that appears to be made of plastic. It is not sharp by any standard. Close-ups on the weapon actually show it to be quite thick and rounded, like a butter-knife handle. If any part of your body was struck by this instrument, I imagine it would just snap off its handle. Only then might it have sharp edges.

Bearing with this movie also requires one to leap over canyonesque plot holes, conjuring questions like "Why didn't that old lady just call the police when she found out her boss at the gas station was harboring and supporting a murderous madman?" But good luck making it that far.

I'm gonna pull out of the film crit and move onto the aftermath. Once the credits had finished their rolling, those "How? Who? What?" questions came flooding in again, and I hit up a web search in hopes of answers. Regarding the American-turned-East-Euro accents, Junior was filmed in Belgium. Apparently, Belgians are "masters of language manipulation" and I wish I had bookmarked the source of that info (I think it was at BleedingSkull.com, one of the best websites around).

I also found a message board with irate victims of Junior lambasting its disentertainment value, though some did say they enjoyed it in that "bad but bad-good" kind of way.

I laughed at one messageboarder saying, "Maybe it is because I am from Belgium but I did not think this movie was bad as you say."

Point being...I don't know. I am so flummoxed by Junior and the creation process of so many others that it's hardly worth mentioning, truly.

So much crap out there. God, I really fell off on this post. Sorry.