Millenial Trash: Banshee!!!

What can I say?  This 2008 horror film was directed by Colin Theys, a man who has pretty much done nothing of it before this film.  He apparently started out as a Visual F/X Designer for such films as Assault of the Sasquatch and Werewolf: The Devil's Hound.  Yeah, I've got nothing.  How about the premise?  Well, a group of 'college kids' go out to the woods and get attacked by a monster.  I'm sorry, but am I talking about this film or 600 other films made since 1995?  The gimmick here is that the Banshee can make people see things it wants them to.  Translation: you save on your CG budget by having your actors double as the monster.  Well, as long as we know where we stand here.  Will this rise above the rest or prove why nobody has ever heard of it?  Get out your hand-made cotton balls for my review of...

We begin with a five-minute scene built around the credits.  Remember how annoying it was in The Greenskeeper?  How the scene would stop ever 10-15 seconds to show a different credit?  Yeah, they do that here.  Basically, a bunch of stoners lust after a woman on TV, go out for 'munchies' and, shock of all shocks, she appears.  When the radio gets played loud, the image flashes for a second, leading to the monster killing them.  After that nonsense, we meet our cast, a septuplet of 'students.'  For some reason, the men drove in one car and the women drove up in another.  The group includes a hot blond (love you), a nerdy girl, an ethnic girl, two jock guys, a black guy and a nerdy guy.  Don't get too attached- they don't stay long.  In addition to that, we get a B-Plot involving some salvage workers uncovering the car from before and finding...a clutch of banshee eggs.  They don't ever explain this, so infer for yourself, I guess.  The man's dog licks this...which doesn't amount to anything.  In addition to that addition, we get the other pair of 'teens' who got there first, but decided to go have sex instead.  After a 'we're hiking' montage, one of the group gets separated and killed by a POV monster.  The group meets him, but things seem awry.  When he chucks a stick through one of the guy's heads, it just confirms it.

By the twenty-minute mark, most of the cast is dead.  They wander around for a bit until one of them stops in a shack and gets cornered by the beast.  Turning a radio on loudly chases the beast off, so they, of course, don't figure this out.  You'll get to the truth in about another forty-minutes or so, I guess.  After some more 'day for night' action, we get an actual night where they meet one of the salvage guys from before, who is now holed up in his house.  Before they can all get in, one of the other guys gets killed off, trimming the group down to three.  At this point, the narrative gets even more unfocused as we follow random people, people in a bar and a policewoman.  Why shoot one movie when you can shoot four?!?  In the bar plot, we learn that one old man is the brother of one of the stoners who was killed in our intro from 1970.  This sub-plot goes somewhere, before crashing to a sudden halt.  The police woman stops two drunks from arguing, before stopping for several drinks.  Oh yeah, she goes to work right after that.  She's also around to set up a plot hole.  In a 'cut-away gag,' we learn that the lusty brunette had the same car that our ladies had.  If that's the case, where did it go?  I suppose I should also mention how the Banshee goes into town to kill people, followed by going back to the house to scare our heroes.

Just to show how unfocused it is, we see the death of the salvage worker's wife and the arrival of his nephew- in a flashback.  Yes, because it would have been too hard to just show that normally!  In the house, tensions rise as the black guy lusts after the hot blond, but gets denied.  Dude, you've been getting denied since you were 12- learn to accept it.  In an obvious moment, the Banshee takes the girl's form and kills him.  By the way, it got in how again?  In more randomness, the Banshee goes into town and kills a mechanic, while in the form of a 'Forest Scout.'  So nice of you to get your niece a part, Mr. Theys.  The monster wreaks more havoc as it kills some cops, who were designed to be the film's saviors.  One of them even gets their head blown up Scanners-style.  As for the stoner's brother, he faces down the monster, grabs a gun and...kills himself.  Ugh.  Since this is a fairly-recent film, I'll leave this one spoiler free.

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...they all die.  The End.

This movie sucks, pure and simple.  Where do I begin with this crap?  The story is a joke, jumping from place to place with no rhyme or reason.  The characters are one-note, save for the black guy who has two of them- creepy and unfunny.  The pacing is odd, as we get major violence early on and then nothing of note for quite awhile.  Speaking of which, let's address the couple that did nothing.  They went off to have sex and vanished from the film for over half an hour.  When we finally cut back to them, they get killed by the monster.  What was their point?  What was the point of the mechanic?  Did the cops add anything to the film, save for their death scenes?  So much of this movie is pointless.  When you look at the cast, you'll see that many of them did other stuff in the film as well.  For example, the film's F/X Director is also the man who plays the salvage worker.  Doing that just proves to what kind of film I'm dealing with.  I will give the film credit for a unique villain idea, but no points for the execution.  It's just a lazy excuse to get around their cheap F/X.  If you have to see every low-budget monster film that didn't make it onto the Syfy Channel, check this out.  If you like good movies, look elsewhere.

Up next, a film that's been talked about for as long as I've run this site finally gets a review.  What other film can you think of that involves molestation, a ghost and the bad guy from Timecop?  Stay tuned...