Wow, a bad anthology movie? No! They’re always so great! Especially no-budget horror ones like Fright Club and House Of The Dead!
That enough sarcasm? Good. Let’s get to tearing apart Before I Die, a god awful piece of worthless shit that has set the bar insanely low for the Decrepit Crypt of Nightmares set (it was the first movie I watched out of the 50).
Filmed with what looks like a VHS camcorder from 1988, this movie is so mind numbingly dull and amateurish, it is borderline inconceivable that anyone involved in the film’s production had the drive to finish it at all once they began editing it together, and even more shocking that anyone, even Mill Creek, would put their name on it and distribute it.
The best thing you can say about it is that it’s somewhat short, clocking in around 80 minutes. They will FEEL like much more, but that’s neither here nor there. There are three stories here, each one marginally better than the one before it, simply because it’s shorter. Thus, the worst/longest comes first, a succubus tale with “comic” elements, mostly from a really horny guy that looks like the love child of Harold Ramis and someone who you might see on a local car dealership on Sunday morning TV.
Now, I hate to make an attack on someone’s physical appearance, but honestly, there’s no way around it: the girl playing the ‘temptress’ is one of the least attractive women I have ever seen in a film. This poses a problem for both the film itself (why would anyone want to fuck this woman at all, let alone follow her around the town as Ramis-lite does?), and for the audience (why would anyone want to see her engaging in sexual activity???). Ugh.
Some 4000 hrs, or 40 minutes, later, the 2nd story begins. This one is also highly sexually charged, as a couple goes to a remote vacation spot and proceed to fuck each other several times, in between bouts of oral sex (the guy's dick must resemble red gravel by the end of the 2nd day). After a while, they start hallucinating and then a giant head yells at them and they leave. The end. I couldn’t even begin to tell you the point of this one.
The third story is the best, and not only because it’s the shortest. This one features some actual action (a couple of slashings in the first few minutes!) and the cast’s only attractive female, who also spends a good deal of her running time in the buff. Thank Mill Creek for small favors. Unfortunately, this one also has the worst technical gaffes, such as a 3 shot stabbing sequence in which the knife is shown being held 3 different ways. Like some other anthology films, this one also ties in a bit to the wrap-around story, but it’s so dumb (not to mention a bit repulsive) it’s not even worth mentioning.
The wrap-around, I will mention, is a writer trying to write a followup to his book (movie? magazine? blog?) "Horrortales" or some shit like that. He spends the first 5 minutes of the film unnaturally talking to himself (read: the audience) as he explains what he’s doing, why he needs to do it, etc. Damn, if only film were a visual medium, these things could be conveyed without having a guy say things like “I have writer’s block. I need to get around it. What did I do last time I wrote?” to no one in particular!
The sound is all recorded through the camera, the actors are all terrible at best, the makeup effects are as inept as they come, and the myriad attempts at humor all fall flat. The same could be said about two films I made in high school, so maybe I should give Mill Creek a call and see if they’ll distribute them on their next budget pack. I think I’d be pretty psyched if, 20 years from now, some dude who was carrying on my e-legacy and literally watching any piece of shit horror movie he came across tore my own amateur movie apart.
50 movies for 20 bucks means you pay about 40 cents per movie. In this movie’s case, I am pretty certain that effectively put them back in the black.
What say you?
And these guys are supposed to be cops.
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