REVIEW: Miner's Massacre (2002)

It’s a movie about a miner going on a massacre, isn’t that an apt title when you know the plot? I think so. I can’t think of anything else to write in this part so let’s just skip to showing the DVD box cover and the usual info:

Director: That guy who made the 7th Friday the 13th Movie

Starring: Generic white people!

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325214/

"You scared the shit out of me!"

-John Leguizamo Stand In #2 (He's being very literal here...)

This gem of a movie begins with an explosion followed by the title, delivered in cheap looking mid-90s dated computer animation, so you know this is gonna be a timeless horror classic! The actual film itself begins with a guy sitting in a cabin. How exciting this is already; how drawn in I am with this riveting set-up! I guess he really wanted out of this movie fast, though, as he gets killed off quickly by the movie’s ‘miner’ killer…

Oh no, not that guy!! He was my favorite character!

Then we get an extremely poor transition as the swipe of the killer’s ax cuts into someone chopping up onions. She’s one of our main characters, but after the movie ends I still have no clue what her name was, or what her personality was supposed to be. All we know is that she talks to her mom on the phone, has a bland boyfriend and gets packages with tiny gold nuggets in them from her brother. This leads her to deduce that it’s TIME FOR ADVENTURE!

Then we cut to some other characters, one of whom looks kind of like John Leguizamo, and the other who is his girlfriend or something, who argues and whines about everything. I bet she’d be best friends with Bridget Fonda’s character from Lake Placid! She complains that she wants to use a bathroom, but also complains when they find one – yes, it’s in a place that looks like the gas station from Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, but damn, this chick is just NEVER HAPPY!

I especially love this one scene where we meet this crazy old guy who works at the gas station. I can’t even decide what to make fun of here. The fact that the girlfriend openly mocks and is rude to the guy with no reason to be other than that she’s a one note character? Or when the John Leguizamo stand-in has a conversation with the guy alone? Yeah I think I’ll go with that one. The guy tells him this story about the miner-killer of the movie, The Forty-Niner, who apparently cursed his gold, and anyone who tries to steal it will be killed, or something like that…

"Here, wipe your ass with toilet paper I pulled out of my back pocket; that's sanitary!"

The Leguizamo stand-in wants to buy this wanted poster from the guy, who says it’s invaluable and a family heirloom, only to change his mind two seconds later when offered 40 bucks. Allow me to bash my head against my desk in frustration. Oh and the killer gets gas station man right after; I guess his worth in the movie went down to nothing after giving us an info-dump…although we’ll have several more info-dumps later on, so who really knows.

So the couple drives some more and we get some more idiotic arguing about nothing that goes on for way too long, and by the end of it I mostly just want to stab both of them. We cut to some other jackasses screwing in a car! Oh the suspense! What position will they use?

Keep your mouth like that long enough and it'll get stuck that way

I love this conversation right here:

IDIOT GIRL: All you care about is money! (With no reason whatsoever for saying this…)

IDIOT GUY: Hey, we all have our passions in life. Mine is money. Yours is…taking your clothes off.

Is she offended? Yes. Will that stop her from screwing him at least two more times in the rest of the movie, utterly without any purpose? Of course not! Women don’t have any complex feelings or depth! They just want to have sex all the time! Didn’t you know?!

So they all meet up and have great conversations that establish what awesome characters they all are! Nah, just kidding, they bicker and whine about nothing and wander around aimlessly. Leguizamo stand-in meets this chick and flirts with her openly, even in front of his girlfriend. OK, it’s time to put on my psychologist glasses and analyze this.

Come take a seat on my couch.

The Leguizamo stand-in is clearly a rotten piece of dog turd for flirting with another girl so shamelessly in front of everyone else including his own girlfriend. However, can you really blame him when his girlfriend nags him all the time over every little thing, and doesn’t seem to have a compassionate bone in her body? My conclusion is that ALL OF THESE PEOPLE ARE WORTHLESS RETARDS! GOD. THEY DESERVE EACH OTHER ACTUALLY. *sips wine and sits back against satin armchair* Ahhhh.

So the girlfriend leaves and gets killed by the killer, even though I don’t think she had any of the gold or a reason for it. I think the killer just found her as intolerable as we all do. Score one for the Forty-Niner, oh yeah! Oh and the two jackasses who were screwing in the car now go and screw in the barn, amid several torrid and unfunny sexual puns…yeah, I guess their libido is higher than the national debt right now.

They find some gold but can’t carry it all because it’s about to get dark by then. So they go into the woods and party! So yeah, more sex and stupid dialogue! What a shocking plot twist! All I have to say about these scenes is, juxtaposing scenes of people having sex with a guy taking a shit…is a really really bad idea, and whoever wrote that scene should be shot point-blank.

"Oh, I love you, I'm glad I went to that terrible party my sister dragged me to, cause otherwise we'd never be in the blandest of bland white people love we are in..."

Yeah, real nice transition - they just cut right from the above scene to this. Isn't that romantic?

The sheriff of the town catches the Leguizamo stand-in in the woods and chases him around with his (the Leguizamo stand-in’s) pants down from trying to take a dump. Why didn’t the sheriff just approach him rationally and, uh, NOT act like a crazy serial killer? Uh…LOOK, CHEESE!

This is apparently the costliest cheese in the world, Pule Cheese. There, you learned something today! You're now smarter than the people who made this movie.

So then the one guy who loves money suspects everyone of conspiring with the sheriff and pulls out a gun, saying it’s business now, oooh. There’s no motivation for him to do this beyond that one line earlier in the movie about how he loves money. That’s some of the worst writing I’ve seen since Blackout! Second graders could write more realistic characters! He gets in the car, tries to drive away with all the gold, but collides with the killer, and everything bursts into flames for no damn reason. Must be those Firestone tires again.

Then the gang meets Karen Black, a veteran actress who has no place in this film. She tells them the same crap about the killer that we already knew, and then uses her magic powers to give us a dragging, inept 5-minute flashback that is about as scary as a Cabbage Patch Kids doll. We see that the miner kidnapped some blonde girl, threatened people in an over the top and silly manner, and bit off his own fingers and spat them at people. Wait, what?

The dreaded finger catapult spit attack, mastered by none other than the Forty-Niner.

That’s…really strange! Why did he do that? He has a weapon, for Pete’s sake; why couldn’t he just have used that? He doesn't even consider it! His first thought, his very first instinct, is to bite his finger off and spit it at the guy attacking him, no joke. That’s the most random, out of nowhere way to attack somebody I’ve ever seen! He runs around and shouts that he’s cursing his gold for anyone else who ever tries to take it, and since we already knew that, this whole scene was more useless padding, hooray!

So in the real world again, we see the gang mobilizing and doing a bunch of really boring stuff which amounts to basically just blowing him up. The gang is happy and gets ready to go home the next day when the sheriff picks up a stray piece of gold and gets killed immediately after touching it, even though that was never how it worked before. Then the movie ends, and I think we’ve all learned a lesson from this movie. The lesson is that you shouldn’t let the director of Friday the 13th part 7 direct a movie. Ever!

Yeah, this was stupid. It’s really, really poorly written, the characters are cardboard cutouts (well, that’s an insult to cardboard manufacturers around the world) and the story is stupid and makes no sense. It’s pretty much just your average every-day bad 2000s horror movie. It’s a dime-a-dozen slasher that will appeal to no one simply because it doesn’t do anything particularly well. Maybe this was supposed to be a comedy-horror or something, but to be honest that wouldn’t really save it anyway. What more can I say? It’s a bad movie and you probably wouldn’t have seen it anyway, but at least you got a review out of it! Until next time, folks.