I rate movies based on whether or not Im scared/entertained. I do not care what the budget is or if the director is "one of the little guys." You don't score points just for trying. With that said, this movie was complete crap. There was nothing scary about it. The fact that people have used it in the same sentence as TCM or Halloween is absolutely astounding (yes, we all know the director had friends and family post reviews here). The plot was boring and slow and there were zero scares. I go into movies looking to have fun, so I don't care if the acting is bad or the storyline not the best. But this movie was just plain flatout boring.

Four desperate bank-robbers flee the scene of their crime, agreeing to regroup at a predetermined rendezvous point, a deserted house in the sticks, to divvy up the spoils. The introduction of a pair of unaccounted-for hostages throws a major spanner in the works, but nowhere near as much as the fact that the gang's hideout lies adjacent to the lair of a vicious serial killer.Stevan Mena's micro-budget horror Malevolence is an homage to three of the most influential scary movies of the 70s and 80s—The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, and Friday the 13th—and as such, originality certainly isn't its strong point; but even though the directorial techniques, visual style, score and general atmosphere will be overly familiar to most fans of the genre, Mena's handling of his material is confident, considered and surprisingly effective, offering viewers plenty of well crafted scares, characters you can actually care about, and a very memorable bogeyman: Leatherface, Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees all rolled into one!Those who are only familiar with contemporary major-studio horror might be disappointed by Malevolence's low-budget aesthetic; others will no doubt accuse the film of ripping off the classics rather than paying tribute to them. I, on the other hand, applaud Mena and pals for not giving a toss about such matters and just getting on with the job at hand: delivering a good old-fashioned scary slasher without even a hint of humour or irony to dilute its impact.

There's nothing original in MALEVOLENCE. That's not very bad in and of itself. But slavish devotion to convention- somebody must say this, someone else must do that, this must happen- bogs it down and there's a terrible stumble at the end that almost lets the air out of the whole project.Before the main titles we see a boy and girl being held captive in a basement some ten years before the main action begins. The boy sees a hooded figure kill the girl. Close up on his face watching the action. Hey, do you think we might see him again? In the present day we meet four very unpleasant characters who are going to rob a bank. Naturally one gets shot. The getaway car has a flat tire.Cut to a mother and her young daughter Courtney at a baseball game. They stop to buy ice cream and meet up with one of the robbers, who kidnaps them and takes the car with mother and daughter as hostages.Soon we're at the hideout, an abandoned farmhouse conveniently close to the torture house we visited before the opening titles.The little girl escapes, and the things you'd expect to happen do so. The characters you expect to die, die; the characters you expect to live, live.What's good about this is that it's wonderfully visualized. The night scenes are dark and grain free, and there's a great musical score. Yes, it's a synthesizer. But it and the camera-work are the best things about the film.Spoilers ahead. Be warned.This doesn't have the standard three act structure. There's the opener ten years ago. The main action starts one afternoon, the bulk of it takes place that night, and there's a really awkward coda at the end.Of all the characters, Mary is the most irritating. She talks her boyfriend into participating in the robbers with her brother and one of his buddies. She's manipulative and bossy. Imagine Lucy from Peanuts speaking with occasional foul language. Ideally she'd be one of the last to die. Instead, she's skewered about halfway through the film.Both mother and daughter get to knock out the hooded maniac pursuing them. You'd think that in that situation they'd take whatever object was at hand and completely smash his head in and kneecap him for good measure. No. They're good people, but the director can't let them end the story that soon.At the end the mother and daughter are rescued by the police. The last surviving bank robber, who has turned out to be a better man than we thought by helping the kidnap victims, walks out the front door holding a gun and falls in a hail of bullets. Irony! Then the sheriff and an FBI man talk. And talk. And talk. New characters are introduced in the last ten minutes, after the main story has finished. Not a good idea.The last new character introduced wears a suit and tie, so we know he's an authority figure. He reads aloud from the journals of the first maniac to let us know that the boy we saw in the opening grew up and got very strong and killed maniac # 1 and took his place as maniac #2 continuing the string of kidnappings and murder.So for an hour the director mainly follows the rule of show, don't tell, then violates that rule like mad.Finally we see the mother and daughter back in their own home. The phone rings. It's the FBI. Oh, and they casually mention that they still haven't found the $450,000 from the robbery. Hey, there's a gym bag in the house that has the money in it. Irony, man, more irony.Mom falls asleep and has a bad dream. She wakes up, she and her daughter are fine, they can get a good night's sleep. As they are drifting off we see a door open behind them.Nope. It's been clearly established that there's no supernatural element at work here. Maniac # 1 was killed by # 2. And #2 was killed by lead poisoning- bullets. They work very effectively on flesh and blood. Both killers are dead, as are all four bank robber/kidnappers.So why did the door open? It's the rules- you've got to leave room for a sequel. Although it's been done literally hundreds of time, someone behind the camera thought this would be a 'surprise' ending. No. Because the camera continued rolling, we knew that something would be coming up.There's a sequel coming. I wish the creative forces the very best of luck on it.

Well I like this film. I bought it about a year ago and just pulled it out of my collection and watched it now. It was better than I expected. Everybody complains about the music. While it might have been slightly loud in spots, it served it's purpose well in heightening the tension. There was good use of 5.1 surround as well, with sound effects moving among the speakers, and making you feel quite "there".The acting wasn't bad either. In fact, for a no-name cast in an obscure horror movie, I didn't see anything wrong with it at all.The story was good. It did have a couple moments where the killer could have been finished off a couple times, but no, silly movie characters leave him on the ground with only one hit instead of repeatedly bashing him in the head. A definite "nobody would have done that" moment.But on the whole, I thought it was a suspenseful horror film.