Other movies in this series:
None

Rish's Reviews
Tyranist and I had one night to get together at his hundred year old home and watch Horror. It was my turn to bring something. And I rented Wedding Slashers. You know, kids, despite all the big words I pay others to insert in my reviews, I'm really a stupid guy.
So, love is in the air. Jenna and Alex are getting married. Of course, Alex's mongoloid friends have their doubts about his getting hitched (like he could ever even PAY to be with a woman that hot outside of a movie), but Jenna has her own doubts. You see, there's a pretty good chance Jenna's family would brutally murder everyone involved if they knew where she was and the details of the wedding. Lucky thing they could never find out, right?
There's a website I frequent where a writer posts essays on interesting topics, displaying an impressive amount of knowledge about a subject I love. But in reading his many postings, I've discovered the writer has a propensity for saying the same things again and again, often using the exact same vocabulary, in multiple essays. I sigh and shake my head when he does it, because it's annoying. But at the same time, I recognise that I do the same thing in my HFC reviews. How many times have I started a review with "When I was a kid . . ." or "I don't remember much about this movie?" And one of the things I say over and over (and over) again I realise I'm about to say here.
Wedding Slashers was a terrible movie. A worthless, stupid, poorly-made and poorly-conceived film. BUT, I couldn't help but notice that there was an idea with great potential at the base of this one. And every once in a while, I could catch a glimpse of how a good movie (hell, even a great one) could have spawned from that potential.
And say it with me, boys and girls, a bad movie with potential that doesn't live up to it is far worse than a terrible movie that never had potential to begin with.
Wedding Slashers is so bad, you never need seek it out. But, being the generous lad that I am, I will list three things I liked about the film:
1. The premise. If you're a Horror fan, you've seen countless movies where there's a group of crazed (sometimes deformed) hillbillies living in the woods (or mountains or ghost town or nuclear test site) that love to kill passersby in the name of family values. But just imagine if one of these families had a daughter who didn't cotton to their ways, and escaped their sanguine lifestyle . . . at least for a while.
Well, that's sort of the premise of Wedding Slashers. I say "sort of," because part of the movie is about amateur filmmakers (and actors) killing time with misguided attempts at comedy (improvisational comedy, maybe, it was pretty hard to tell), perhaps thinking that rambling monologues equal character development. And there are anticlimactic chases and people who show up solely for their death scenes (which makes it a bit hard to like them), and a midget who shows up for no reason at all. But in between all that, there is a premise that could have been good, maybe even great.
2. The lead actress, Jessica Kinney, was not only surprisingly beautiful (tyr and I kept remarking on it, practically startled by her good-lookingosity), but actually pretty competent in her role. I wish her MUCH better things in the future. And
3. There were some impressive splatter effects, using tried-and-true Savini-era prosthetics. Not all of them were great, but a couple of decapitations were so effective, a real studio would employ expensive CGI to pull them off.
And that's it. The budget was obviously limited, and many times it showed. But hey, so was the budget on Night of the Living Dead and Clerks and Let's Scare Jessica To Death and Evil Dead and The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and that didn't make those films garbage.
I can see now, in retrospect, how the makers tried to give their family of murderers "unique" looks and nicknames, just like the Texas Chainsaw family and their ilk had. But they were all so common and similarly non-creative that I didn't realise this until the credits (which featured them in "triumphant" closeups). Oh, and I don't know what Richard Lynch was doing in this movie, but it couldn't have taken more than a night. Don't you waste even that much on it.
Posted: February 12, 2007

The tyranist's thoughts
Jessica Kinney.
Rish sometimes shows up with a movie under his arm that he knows will be bad and we watch it anyway. We've been doing it for years. And this was just such a case.
Jessica Kinney.
The movie was largely amateurish and had so many plot holes and contradictions that I gave up trying to sort it all out about three-quarters of the way through. The wedding that was the central set piece was obviously a fiction from the start. The chapel was improbably remote. The complete lack of guests was odd for anything short of an elopement. And speaking of which, if she knew her family would do this, why didn't they just head to Vegas and seal their marriage with Elvis?
Jessica Kinney.
Toward the end, when the family all show up and everything sort of goes to hell (both story-wise and my attention span-wise), I kept wondering why they would be so foolish as to do this so close to the family. I wondered a lot of things though.
Jessica Kinney.
There was one good thing about the movie though. Her acting wasn't brilliant (in fact, it was pretty wooden sometimes), but I don't blame her for that. There was no material. In a lot of ways she carried the movie. Or, at the very least, I found that when she was on screen, it was much easier to keep looking than to turn away. I really hope she gets more work.
Posted: February 12, 2007

Total Skulls: 44

Sequel
Sequel setup
Rips off earlier film		various killer hillbilly family movies
Horror film showing on TV/in theater in movie
Future celebrity appears
Former celebrity appears
Bad title
Bad premise
Bad acting
Bad dialogue
Bad execution
MTV Editing
OTS
Girl unnecessarily gets naked
Wanton sex
Death associated with sex
Unfulfilled promise of nudity
Characters forget about threat
Secluded location
Power is cut
Phone lines are cut
Someone investigates a strange noise
Someone runs up stairs instead of going out front door
Camera is the killer
Victims cower in front of a window/door
Victim locks self in with killer
Victim running from killer inexplicably falls
Toilet stall scene
Shower/bath scene
Car stalls or won't start
Cat jumps out
Fake scare
Laughable scare
Stupid discovery of corpse
Dream sequence
Hallucination/Vision
No one believes only witness
Crazy, drunk, old man knows the truth
Warning goes unheeded
Music detracts from scene
Death in first five minutes
x years before/later
Flashback sequence
Dark and stormy night
Killer doesn't stay dead
Killer wears a mask
Killer is in closet
Killer is in car with victim
Villain is more sympathetic than heroes
Unscary villain/monster
Beheading
Blood fountain
Blood spatters - camera, wall, etc.
Poor death effect
Excessive gore
No one dies at all
Virgin survives
Geek/Nerd survives
Little kid lamely survives
Dog/Pet miraculously survives
Unresolved subplots
"It was all a dream" ending
Unbelievably happy ending
Unbelievably crappy ending
What the hell?