Gorehounds Unite!

It's a holiday weekend, and while most of the students on campus have headed back home for a few days, the remaining sisters at one local sorority house are about to discover that their temporary chef uses his cleaver to carve up more than just the turkey. When they first learned that the house staff was taking the weekend off, the girls presumed that they would have to live on take-out for a couple of days. Thankfully, someone has been kind enough to provide them with a temporary chef to ensure they remain well fed. But now the girls are disappearing one by one, and it seems that the new chef may be to blame for all the bloody mayhem that's beginning to unfold.

 Being a fan of movies such as the "Slumber Party Massacre" series and "Sorority House" I was excited to see another film in the same vein as those so called classics so when I recieved "The Cook" I hurried to watch the film.

 The first and most notable thing I noticed was the very cheap look of a film shot on digital which was very painfully apparent here. The look of the film can be seen in many of the cheapo straight to DVD horror films that clutter the rental shelves across the country. You know the ones....they all have a very appealing cover but when you pop them in you get a film with very little production value at all.

 I will give it credit in the fact that "The Cook" does stand at the top of most of these cheapo productions and even surpasses it's digital look at times. That being said.......

 "The Cook" is possibly the most cnfused film I have ever seen..... It's touted as a Horror Comedy but there isnt a scare to be seen an the comedy is nonexistent. It fails miserably in the regards that it can't make up it's mind on what it wants to be and ends up failing horribly on both fronts as a result.

 To me there is just no excuse for a film that runs a scant 82 minutes to be this boring and feel like a 4 hour epic to get through. The dialogue alone was reason enough to turn this drivel off....And the characters stand as some of the worst ones ever written. I have never wanted characters to die so fast in a movie just so I wouldnt have to put up with them anymore nor hear them speak.

 This brings us to the acting....and I use the term acting very very loosely as there virtually is none to speak of in this film which just makes all of its other faults all the more noticable. The only decent acting seen in "The Cook" comes from our main villan played by Mark Hengst. But even his solid performance cant save this mess of a movie.

 This is the type of film where you get no background on the characters and there is absolutley no character development to speak of. These characters are simply thrown in the movie in cookie cutter fashion to be easily dispatched by The cook.

 This brings us to the gore and special effects.....while they look good and are definitly of the gross out variety I still have to denounce them as bad because all it really comes down to is they used real meat and threw some fake blood into the mix to make it messy. The only effects that came off as skillfull was a neck slashing early in the film that was done to near perfection.

 I really have to get on my soapbox with regards to this film as i am getting tired of filmmakers taking advantage of the fans with garbage like this film. There is no thought as far as plot goes.....hell there really is only the bare minimum of plot in the whole movie needed to make a film.

 This is simply a case of someone in an office saying " Shit....horror is really profitable these days and you can make them for little to no budget and they will always turn a tidy profit". Then you get a hack director who will no doubt defend the film by saying it doesnt try to be anything but an 80's styled slasher film with paint by number murder scenes......no more and no less. While this may be the case with aot of the bad 80's horror the difference is the good ones actually had a soul and had filmmakers that really loved the genre.

 It's time for horror fans to say enough is enough and stay away fom this sort of cinematic abortion. I for one have had enough of these hack directors vomiting on a camera and calling it a film. It's getting old................

 However if your looking for a film that features alot of nubile young women getting naked and killed this would be a great rental for you. Hell it's got lesbian scenes, bondage scenes, and women thinking about sex, talking about sex and hell even having sex (both with a partner and without).

 However if your looking for a fun film or even a decent horror film steer clear of this pile of dung and go pick up the Slumber Party Massacre or similar themed 80's series of films. Youll find alot more depth in those than you will here.

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 RATING:

1 1/2 out of 5 Severed Heads