KOLOBOS (1999)
a review by Evan Landon
Low-budget movies are easy to make. One does not need an overblown budget to make something that an audience will watch, as long as it hits the hallmarks of an entertaining film. Making an entertaining one, or one that breaks through the unremarkable financial ceiling, is difficult in itself, but that is something elusive to even the most seasoned of filmmakers. Kolobos is in that dreamlike purgatory in between.
In Kolobos, a young woman named Kyra signs up for a late nineties reality tv show where five strangers live in a house with hidden cameras in the style of the Big Brother series, except some people will actually be watching it. Instead, on the very first night of getting to know each other, the group finds themselves locked inside the house with a sadistic killer who has laid lethal traps throughout the rooms. As she battles her own memories and sanity, Kyra must pull the small group together to escape a horrific death.
What makes Kolobos a low-budget horror movie worth watching is not the wooden acting, predictable plot, and laughable dialogue, but the care and consideration that was placed in the practical effects. The more major league studios sacrifice lingering effects for computer generated images, the less a fan of any intellectual property or half-baked nostalgia bait is ever going to give a shit about any medium it is presented upon.
The Slaughterhouse Factor, the series of movies inside of the movie the blonde actress chick with stupid bangs was in is a much more interesting slasher inside of a slasher. It is almost as if the writing trio of Daniel Liatowitsch, David Todd Ocvirk, & Nne Ebong watched Scream, Saw, and too many episodes of MTV’s The Real World when they started writing the screenplay. Halloween: Resurrection came out a few years later that is almost scene-for-scene the same low quality schlock, minus Busta Rhymes & Tyra Banks. At least the team had them beat on that one.
Without any hyperbole, I almost turned the movie off after the first few minutes because of how horrible the quality of the production had been, but decided to let it play out just to have something to discuss on the Todd Jaeger Experience panel, which has become one of my favorite things to be a part of! I absolutely do not mind watching questionably lower quality flicks because it allows for cinematic sensibilities to truly shine through. Sure, it is not for everybody, but if you can make it through the first half hour of banal dickery to the first kill, it could be worth a gander.
I would be remiss not to mention a blink-and-you-will-miss-it cameo by scream queen legend Linnea Quigley. That might be worth the price of admission alone.
3 Out Of 5