To Become One

To Become One (no doubt named after my friend Xavier’s favorite Spice Girls song) is a surprisingly decent horror movie from Australia (or possibly New Zealand – opinion on IMDB is a little divided on this). It transforms itself halfway through, playing more like an old 70s grindhouse style film than a straight-to-DVD-budget-pack piece of crap like most of the films in the set have been. It’s a much appreciated change of pace from what I’ve largely been dealing with up to this point, making it the only film really worth watching on this entire disc.

The film starts playing out like a standard slasher movie, with our heroine seeing a man in an old gas mask murder her mother, then a year later finding her friends stalked and murdered one by one by him. In an inspired decision, they flee their town in favor of hiding in an abandoned cabin out in the middle of nowhere, where there’s clearly no chance for a mad killer to find and hurt them. Shortly after this master plan fails, though, the film takes a turn for the weird and turns more into a Don’t Look in the Basement style movie, as our heroine is captured and locked up in a creepy clinic where a mad doctor is experimenting on people. I won’t reveal what exactly gets revealed there, partly because it wouldn’t be fair to the film, and partly because it’s not really that exciting, but it still brings things above the rest. It’s a different kind of stupid, I guess is what I’m getting at. It’s a stupid that entertains pretty well, rather than the stupid I’ve been getting that just makes me want to claw my eyes out in frustration at watching such drivel.

I know I said before that all I needed was one fun movie on this disc to keep my every other week rotation in effect, but I’m still going to take an extra long breather from this collection. I need to recharge my batteries a bit with some movies that aren’t, you know, total garbage, or good mostly in comparison to total garbage, and getting maybe one movie out of four that really fits that bill is not really enough for me, you know? Sorry to anyone in my devoted fan base who was curious as to how this set was gonna play out, but you’re going to be waiting an extra few weeks/months for that. Though to turn this back around to our main review, To Become One? Not too shabby, you could do much worse than it. And if there had only been a movie coming up later in the set titled Spice Up Your Life, I'd be all over it.

Rating: **