Rose of Death

I hate to say it, but not only is this the highlight of disc 8 on the Tomb of Terrors set, but it’s not even noticeably worse than actual “professional” horror movies of its ilk. Yeah, it’s a lousy movie, but I really can’t offhandedly think of a single horror movie where we get a high school prank gone horribly wrong leading to a double homicide (don‘t you hate when that happens?), and now years later all the kids are back for their class reunion and are now shockingly being murdered one by one, that wasn’t complete garbage. I mean, Class Reunion Massacre? Slaughter High? If anyone is remembering these movies with any fondness, they are bad people and you shouldn’t be talking to them.

So yes, now that you know what the general premise of the film is, you know the entire plot from start to finish, excepting a boring subplot about one of the young accessories to murder and her overall guilt and relationship troubles. So how do the important issues with such a film work? Well, the kills are moderately bloody (you’ll have seen much better than this, but you’ll also have seen much worse -- in fact, you can see much worse on this very disc), if not especially inspired, the killer was not who I initially assumed it was, and there are a couple surprises both in the order of those killed, and in who winds up being killed, so it has that going for it. The ages of the people, always an issue in films that jump forward a decade, mostly work out (the only character that still looks like she belongs in high school actually has someone tell her that, which was a nice touch).

The direction (by L. Alan Brooks) is as lazy as one would expect, though, and the acting is almost universally terrible, the lone exception being the hard-ass boss of an auto dealership (Dave Narramore), who does such a convincing job that, combined with the fact that this is the only movie he’s ever appeared in, I am forced to conclude that he actually is a hard-ass boss at an auto dealership. They clearly made the wrong film and should have made a script that revolved more around him.

There’s not that much else to say about this film. It’s such a rehash of the bad films that came before it that it was almost as if I had seen this multiple times before. While it is still the best film on this disc (and what a sliding scale non-achievement that is), it’s also much more cookie-cutter and forgettable than any of the other three, and it’s almost certainly going to be the first one I completely forget ever existed. I only wish I could make that claim about tomorrow’s entry.

Rating: *