Written and directed by Jason William Lee. Starring Valter Skarsgard, Christopher Gerard, Dayleigh Nelson, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Karolina Benefield, Khamisa Wilsher, Mathias Retamal, Amanda Howells and Jerome Velinsky.
Plot: a group of C-list celebrities are invited to compete on a reality show that turns out to be too real as those voted off suffer horrible fates for the world to see.
This poor excuse for a film follows Kasper Norden (Skarsgard) mainly, who accepts an invitation to join a reality show. The show pits “famous” people against others just like them. Kasper is known for being the ex-husband of a famous singer. Joining him on the show are Headstone (Gerard), an MMA bad boy, Nevin Eversmith (Nelson), a vlogger known for talking about viral videos, Ximena (Guerrero), a famous blogger from Mexico, Ula La More (Benefield), an instagram fitness model, Lonni Byrne (Wilsher), a reality show “bachelorette” who famously got dumped by more than one guy on national television, Dex ‘El Shocker’ (Retamal), a second-rate rapper and reality star and Cat Zim (Howells), an actress and oddly, a chess grandmaster.
Honestly, the set up was not bad. We did not like anyone at first, but that made it all the more reasonable that they should go through this hell. After three fun days, a vote is taken and the world puts Lonni and Nevin in the bottom. And since this movie is just totally unsatisfactory, I’m going to satisfy myself and tell you everything so that you don’t have to watch the whole thing like we did.
******SPOILER ALERT******
**********************************
******************************************
The man holding them hostage is Nero Alexander (Velinsky) and he’s demented and sad. When Lonni and Nevin end up in the bottom, Nero has these men (who wear large panda heads and carry guns) escort them to the “kill room”. Once there, Nevin is actually taken elsewhere, while Lonni is blindfolded, handed a bat and told to break open the “pinata” in a matter of seconds. Only the pinata is really Nevin, who has been strung up and gagged. After that, Lonni is rightfully shaken up. Having watched it all through a window, everyone else is at a loss as well.
There’s “rules” to this game of course, but only for the contestents, not for Nero. Dex tries to break out which is against the rules and is killed when the panda heads dip him in acid. Ula and Ximena are made to fight each other, in the dark, with axes. Ximena is axed to death and after the next vote, Ula is pulled apart. She takes one of the panda heads with her by biting his jugular though. One of the better moments in the movie because by this point, we were on the celebrities side completely.
Nero is an ass with far too many words that mean absolutely nothing since he’s not a fair man. He claims that celebrity is unfair, but it turns out that he’s sort of a celebrity himself. He’s also very rich and very unfair which goes against his own reasoning. Clearly a sociopath, he has Headstone fight a gigantic man named Boris to the death. We loved Headstone and were happy when he won. Then, Nero sends in three more fighters though, telling Headstone he now has to defeat them all. Of course, he loses and is beaten to death.
Eventually, Kasper and Lonni are in the kill room together and they’re given guns and told to duel. They refuse, kiss each other and shoot themselves in the head. Nero hates that they didn’t play along, but what can he do? He gives the prize money to Cat and disappears. Cat is found by police, questioned and released. She makes her way to Nero though and it turns out she was in on the whole thing. My god.
The whole thing was unoriginal. We’ve seen it before and with less bullshit. Nero was a horrible bad guy with a horrible motive. He kept quoting Shakespeare, too, which was unacceptable since Shakespeare was 300% cooler and more reasonable than him. The acting was okay and there was a boob shot, but only one and there could have been more. And now that I’ve spent too much time even thinking about this crap, I am done.
Our score: 15.
BLOOD RED REVIEWS 