[Banshee!!]
Plot:A group of college friends on a spring break camping trip are stalked and slashed by an unknown creature with the ability to make them hallucinate through sound waves. The survivors hold up refuge in an isolated farmhouse, cut off from all communication. Now, they have to come up with a plan to kill this unrelenting creature before it kills them.

Cast:Ashley Bates, Kevin Shea, David McCarthy, Kerry McGann, Iris McQuillan-Grace, Troy Walcott, Greg Nutcher, Leo Petry, A. Mike Forgette, Cristina Santiago, John Doolan, Nathan Pupillo, Jess Wakefield, Jesse Murphy, Michael Barra.

My Thoughts:Screams of boredom and dread.

Review:"Banshee!!" is an indie creature feature which says it's tired of having cgi snakes, cgi spiders, and cgi lizards chasing down and murdering dumb college kids. So instead, it decides to use the old celtic legend of the Banshee as it's antagonist. Based on myth, Banshee's are creatures whose scream can do anything from turn people to stone, to cause hallucinations within them. In this movie, the creatures sonic yell can cause hallucinations, but being that it's an indie horror film, with college students in it, we get the dumbed-down version of things.

As in the monster chasing, killing, and then chasing again, it's less-then-intelligent prey. The movie follows some college kids who head up to the woods on a spring break camping trip. Which first and foremost is false because everyone knows college kids on Spring Break go to Florida or Cancun. Anyways, we know by now that in horror movies, bad things happen in the woods.

"Sleepaway Camp" and "Friday the 13th" make this point very clear. However in "Banshee!!", the kids don't have to worry about a serial killer, as much as they do the vicious and winged title monster. This movie is boring and predictable because it decides to play out that way. It makes it well know that the writer had no delusions of grandeur. They wanted the movie to be digestable to the A-typical suburban teenager. Not genre fans, or horror movies fans looking for something atleast a bit high brow.

This movie is like "American Pie" meets "Jeepers Creepers". Only if "American Pie" had porno movie production values, and "Jeepers Creepers" didn't hire Jonathan Breck, but instead decided to make The Creeper a CGI monstrosity. Now if both of those movies had went in that direction, and you then fused the two? You'd have "Banshee!!" in a nutshell. The characters are all one-dimensional, and a token black guy even makes an appearance. And of course he dies first among the films males (charming), but seriously, in one scene a girl is running too damn slow and ends up being brutally butchered by the creature as it rounds the corner.

A scene which the director obviously thought would be one of the movies standout moments. But instead, is played out so laughably that it looks friggin ridiculous, and instead, you just laugh at the girl for being so slow-footed. Then her friends give the usual fake-concern routine knowing full well they can't save the girl because by this time her spleen is on the outside of ehr body. Yep, it's just ridiculous nonsense like this that makes this movie hard to watch without taking some advil for an oncoming migraine headache.

With that being said, there is one or two slight silver linings to the dark cloud known as "Banshee!!". A lot of the kills are funny and entertaining due to their sheer ludicrousness (one character is killed inside a car as the creature hides in the backseat), and the monsters weakness? Garage-band rock music! Amazing! There's a really hilarious scene where the last few youngsters left decide to perform a lawn-based rock concert to get a slight measure of revenge against the creature for slaughtering their friends.

But did they really have a choice? After all, when you're college students being chased by a winged beast, in rural U.S.A., you pretty much have to help yourself because the local hicks are either too scared, mean, or wasted to be of any assistance. Hence, the concert. The films finale is the last laugh and a joke on all of us, as it suggests that a sequel could be coming down the pike. But by that time, the last scream of "Run you idiot!'' from the viewer to the films not-too-bright characters, would have driven the viewer so crazy that any sequels ideas would be met with groans, eye-rolling, and head-hanging. Might wanna avoid "Banshee!!". It's a scream alright, a bad one.

Positives:Some of the kills are so ridiculous you can't help but laugh.

Negatives:Bad writing, bad, one-dimensional, and cliche characters, a horrible-looking cgi monster.

Overall:One star out of four.





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