Look. I knew this would be a bad movie going into it. I watched it wanting to watch a bad movie. Well, that’s not totally true, I wanted to watch a good (or at least entertaining) B-rate horror movie. There’s a few different kinds of B-rate movies; The ones that are campy, tongue-and-cheek playing off the low budget and often less than exceptional writing & acting, the ones that try to be serious and put forth a decent bit of effort in order to make the best product they can despite their limitations, and then the ones like this. This feels like it wants to be a serious horror movie, the editing choices are godawful at times, the vfx is inconsistent, lazy, and it is clear no one working on the film actually cared about making it look like more than an ounce of effort was expended on it. This is so goddamn awful, and so goddamn dumb. To those of you that read this and think, “Oh it’s that bad? It must be so bad it’s good.”…
This film takes place in Druid Hills, Kentucky, where murders keep happening in the corn fields and witnesses are reporting great white sharks in the corn fields. Evidently there’s a cult to the shark god Chichimatul here because the corn fields are on top of an ancient burial ground thus making this the perfect place to sacrifice victims for Chichimatul. The whole point of the murders in this particular cornfield (as well as elsewhere but the corpses transported to the field to be buried there), is so that once there are 666 sacrifices, and all the stillbirths of Chichimatul are located and buried there, that on the next blood moon Chichimatul can enter a human host, change the cultists present into fish-people, and supposedly bring the sacrifices back to life in some altered form.
The story is a fitting B-rate movie story, give it to Lloyd Kauffman and I’m sure something remotely enjoyable would’ve been produced. Instead it seems like the writers took $50, bought some clearance halloween props and took the remainder to a single local thrift store to find some other props, then threw together a hap dash story and movie script around what they bought. Need a helicopter pilot headset? Here’s a set of noise cancelling earphones and a stick mic hanging off the side. Need a blowgun? Here’s a black plastic straw. Somehow one of the police shirts they have appears to have a legit looking police department patch on the arm, while simultaneously having “Cop” in white vinyl silkscreened letters on the front.
There were several times where there was zero blood while someone was being actively mutilated, and then after would slow pan over an actor laying down with some thin lines of red liquid on them. It had to be corn syrup mixed with water and a single drop of red or pink food dye, it looked super thin and rather light in overall color. On one occasion while a child was being eaten by a shark off screen the camera was looking at a frisbee while someone squirted what did look like straight up ketchup on it. On another occasion while someone was being killed, they added static red blood splotches over the screen several times. The attempts at special effects was extremely inconsistent in both style and effort. Hell at the end someone’s head is blown off with a grenade after the CIA operative that had the straw blow gun drops it on her and says, “Have a grenade bitch.” and somehow they actually managed one decent visual effect there. If this movie poked fun at itself like most good B-rate movies it would’ve at least gotten a star or two. It would’ve at least gotten a laugh. SOME entertainment value.
Black star, I don’t recommend anyone waste their time with this, go watch literally anything else. If you want a chuckle maybe load up the movie on Amazon Prime Video, and go to 1:42:40 to watch the guy dunk the grenade on Chichimatul incarnate and the one piece of semi-passable cgi. But watching the whole movie for that one moment wont even get much of a laugh, just a feeling of that little bit of comic relief was far too little too late to be properly enjoyed.
Cthulhuville 