ONE OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES FROM when I was a small child was going to the butcher shop and fish market. At such a small age it did not really register with me that the items on display were originally breathing and living things. They looked more like cartoon characters. The fish market had crates filled with crushed ice all around the room, and a huge table in the center with similar crates. I was always amazed with the variety of fish that were lying on top of the ice. So many different colors and shapes, with these open eyes staring out; in my mind they were frozen stiff. There were men working behind the counters filled with ice. Dressed in white aprons, they would lift the fish the customers were pointing at and do something with them that many times involved a whacking sound. After a moment there was the sound of paper ripping in the air and the butcher would turn back around with the fish wrapped up in stiff brown paper, tied with a string. All of them worked in unison like a well-oiled machine as the process went smoothly. I never wanted to touch any of the fish; the smell was enough to make me keep my distance.      THE BUTCHER SHOP HAD A MYSTIQUE that aligned more with my imagination. There always were soft downy chicken feathers floating around people’s feet. I used to walk around the shop just to stir up the feathers, making it appear like I was walking in a field of cottonwood seeds and dandelion fluff. It was easier to focus on the chicken feathers than seeing the row of bare chickens hanging from a rack enclosed in a glass case. Except for the chickens, nothing else looked like an animal except for the tray filled with tongues in the deli section. When I found out that pile of meat was from an animal’s tongue and people would willingly eat it for a meal, I got sick to my stomach. It mentally scarred me where I disliked having to go to the shop. Also, it did not help that most meats on display were red colored. As I got older, the store represented more of a torture chamber than a neighborhood retail establishment. Seeing a butcher slicing, deboning and cutting meat products was creepy. Customers would walk out with these odd, shaped packages that were wrapped in waxy paper that came from a large dispenser that looked like a carpet roll. No matter how gross things appeared in the butcher shop back then, I would rather be locked up and forced to watch the butchers all day than see this grotesque, bloody horror movie.      WHEN THEIR HEIST DOES NOT GO as planned, the robbers and their hostage find a farmhouse to lie low in until things die down. However, they would find something that was terrorizing to them. With Emile Hirsch (American Night, Into the Wild) as Alex, Stephen Dorf (Don’t Go, World Trade Center) as Cody, Gigi Zumbado (A Night to Regret, Bridge and Tunnel-TV) as Grace, Vernon Wells (The Christmas Tapes, Weird Science) as the Doctor and Tyler Sanders (Just Add Magic-TV, The Rookie-TV) as Danny; this action thriller was more horror than action thriller. I thought Gigi had the best screen presence and did not mind the beginning of the film. However, the turn it soon took was horrible. Besides showing nothing different in this genre, there were non-believable scenes, poorly written scenes and a bare budget look to the movie. I strongly reacted to the gory and bloody, torturous scenes. It felt to me like the writers and director just wanted to see if they could get a reaction out of the viewer. Well, they did; I was sorry I spent the time watching this putrid picture. And the fact Emile was one of the producers made me question his mental capabilities. This was the worst film that I have seen in the past year.          

1 star