Simon Says

Whorticulture.com Reviews Simon Says, Starring Crispin Glover and Margo Harshman

Haha oh god, this movie.  This fucking movie.  My TiVo surprise suggested this and I knew I had to check it out because I saw people on Twitter saying it was super gory.  I'm so happy I did, but it was SO. FREAKING. BAD.  It seriously is gory as hell.  And it was on Chiller - I can only imagine how gory it is uncensored!  I was intrigued enough to put it in my Netflix queue and see, even though I know I won't be able to bribe anyone into watching it with me.  My boyfriend does not appreciate the cheese like I do.

I don't even know where to start.  Crispin Glover, who is a mega douche and prone to temper tantrums at independent movie theaters (nobody will ever forget it, sorry dude), plays murderous hillbilly twins.  And he does it POORLY.  So poorly.  At one point his Southern accent turns into an English accent...like, if you hit an English person on the head and it impacted their speech.  It was terrible.

So it's a group of teenagers who go into the woods for camping and gold mining, and they get slaughtered one by one by these twins.  You might be thinking that's a gem of a concept and can't go wrong.  Oh, but it can.

There's two forms of acting in a horror movie.  There's the acting you pull off when you're being killed, and there's the acting you pull off on the "in-between" times when it's normal dialogue and storyline.  I think pulling off a decent killing scene is harder than normal dialogue, but for some reason the actors in this movie excelled at dying and sucked hard during the storyline.

Aside from the terrible acting, you're overwhelmed with seriously shit-tastic effects.  There's a scene where Crispin Glover stomps a little white dog named Tofu, and it was so bad it reminds me of something I did in 8th grade with MS Paint.  If it wasn't so atrocious you might actually feel bad that he killed a dog, but the sheer atrocity makes it completely unbelievable.  They apparently had a $10 effects budget.

There's one scene where Crispin Glover kills a girl running through the woods with her portable CD player (even though this movie came out in 2006).  He chops off her head, hands and feet, and assembles them on a stump.  As her friends, who have just discovered her, are screaming...the CD player ejects the CD through her mouth.  I laughed so hard.  This 10 second scene is hands down the best part of the entire movie.

This movie was absolutely terrible, but it's so worth the watch just for the laughs you'll get.  And my god is it gory.  But it was so bad my boyfriend took one look and said "hell to the no."  He marched his ass out of the room.  But god, you guys gotta try it.  5/10

Oh and PS: why the hell is Blake Lively's entire family in this movie?  There are 4 Lively's in this movie, and that's 3 too many.  More movies should have Robyn Lively in them, but I don't even remember her in this movie.