VOD Review - Crazy Bitches

Jane Clark's feature debut as writer-director was a great character study called Meth Head (2013). She follows it up with this horror film, a slasher flick in the vein of Friday the 13th (1980). It's not as thrilling as a traditional thriller. Clark's tone or atmosphere is a step or two toward campy. It's more of a lark than being sufficiently scary. The murders are creepy, but maintaining a level of seriousness when depicting brutality or cruelty easily achieves creepy. There are obvious red herrings, maybe too many, and a general blase attitude from the characters, even when real danger is dropped on them.

One frustrating aspect is at one point we see that the two killers are working together. Their identities are obscured. One of the killers is revealed at the end, but the other isn't, or at least the identity of the second isn't clear. There's a shot at the end that's telling, but again, not clear. By the end, I wasn't sure if the second killer was dead or alive. Maybe Clark is saving that for the sequel, but I would have preferred something more definitive here.

I'm also not sure we're given enough information about the victims to truly understand them. As odd as it sounds, I don't think the women talk about each other enough. Six women gather at a secluded cabin up in the woods. The actresses playing those women do a good job of letting us know what the personalities of their characters are, but Clark barely scratches the surface with them.

Many of those women are eventually killed and each has a specific reason for their demise, but not much depth is provided to justify those reasons. Of course, justification is never truly possible. The killings are wrong and the guilty culprit is exactly that, if not completely insane, except the ending would seem to suggest otherwise, if not the opposite.

If we are to go with the ending, then more depth into the characters would have been preferred. More drama would have been preferred. One of the women has cause to hate most of the others but she doesn't. There's an element of Seven or Saw in which the victims are being punished for their sins or their own offenses, except everybody's sin seems to be the same, vanity. Yes, all is vanity.

Like with most horror films, the overall effect is a sex negative effect. People, particularly women, are killed because they decided to have sex. Granted, it's sex with people they shouldn't have. It's essentially a quasi-revenge fantasy or nightmare for adultery.

Liz McGeever stars as Minnie, a girl who despite having same-sex attractions is at worst a closet case. At best, she's just an uptight and conservative blonde. She comes across as virginal and noble. This is opposed to everyone else being horny, canon fodder, although Minnie does get a pretty intimate moment, played to "Crimson and Clover."

The other women are beautiful and interesting. You wish Clark would have given them a bit more to dig into their characters. Blake Berris (Days of Our Lives) is an amazing and incredibly sexy actor, but he's terribly one-note in this film. Trey McCurley (Hot Guys With Guns) is also an amazing and incredibly sexy actor who is barely used here. He briefly appears twice and the second time he doesn't even speak. David Fumero (One Life to Live and Power) is an amazing and incredibly sexy actor too, but clearly he's only eye-candy here.

In a film by and mainly about women, this is perfectly fine. Women have been marginalized and objectified for so long. The men can be equally marginalized and objectified here. Yet, the whole thing just ends with a shrug. I didn't feel the losses.

Two Stars out of Five.
Not Rated but for mature audiences.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 40 mins.
Available on Hulu.