Toronto After Dark 2007: Simon Says review
Five college friends choose to spend their vacation debauching at the riverside in gold prospecting country. They hear about the local folklore, of the crazy killer who kills one victim for every year he is alive, and how there is some catching up to do for past years. Dismissing the tale as urban myth they find the perfect place to camp out, smoke up and entertain their carnal desires. No sooner do they end up crossing paths with twin brothers Simon and Stanley. One of these brothers has a surly disposition and soon begins to pick off our horny gaggle of hapless victims, including a poodle and a group of weekend warriors. You would think that this was a guaranteed good time at the cinema...
I feel the fatal error in this film is that Stanley the psycho killer is revealed too soon. This isn’t a spoiler on my behalf. At first the killer is running through the forest in a ghillie suit. In the back of your mind you know it is Stanley. And no sooner has he claimed his first victim and he has removed the top half and surprise, surprise, it’s Stanley! Without leaving room for the element of surprise and suspense director/writer William Dear laid all of his cards out of the table very early in the film and rode on Glover’s shoulders through to the end. And I thought this was a fatal mistake. A rookie mistake. The success of this film is banking on Crispin Glover’s performance and the audience’s reaction to his over the top psycho killer antics. Audiences are going to polarize with his performance. Glover fans will be more forgiving but Mr. Dear, writing your ticket on Glover was a mistake. You deserve the same fate as your son, Oliver, who you pulled into this mire as your Second Unit Director and Prod Designer and played the hitchhiker who was plucked from the side of the road early in the film.
It is also silly to try to solicit empathy from an audience when you have set up your cast as fodder. I’m thinking specifically where the stoner Zack confesses his love for Kate. Zack of course is tied to a tree, Kate to a table, and either one of them will meet their fate in the following seconds. But why bother? Why write that in when it is clear from the script that we are supposed to attach our affections to Crispin Glover’s Stanley and his psycho killer persona? And shame on you for writing in a group of weekend warriors, camping in the woods playing paintball, just so you can up your body count. Even if Stanley had to make up for lost birthdays why would Dear randomly insert them part way through the college student story arc when he could have started with them. It would have paced the film better and perhaps set up a bit of the menace of the psycho killer.
Clearly the effort wasn’t made to make the kills any more than they had to be. Granted, ‘Fishing for the Asian girl with a pick-axe’ was an inspired creation but other than that the kills bordered on dull. Scenes of young actors running through a forest ducking under a flurry of CG flying pick axes doesn’t instill a sense of fear in the viewer. Why do we care to see numerous shots of Stanley’s contraptions fling a seemingly endless number of pick axes through the air? We don’t. Forget the question of where hundreds of pick axes come from. What I want to know is if you’re going to use them why wouldn’t you be more creative with them? Give us a sense of danger by obliterating a few trees with them. Or, have one of your hapless victims watch each pick axe get closer and closer until the final blow. Pin them down like a circus flying dagger act and then deliver the final blow. Be creative all the time! Not just once!
Simon Says was easily the worst film I had seen at this year’s festival. There is nothing forgivable about it. It is a wretched turd of a horror film with no redeeming qualities, at all. It has to be about more than the kills; especially when the kills suck.
