Will You Be Strong For Mommy?
Main Cast: Dinah Meyer, Frank Whaley
Director: Jimi Jones
Each year there are movies produced that are never seen by the public. Their content is considered too graphic, too disturbing, too shocking for general audiences. This is one of those films.
Then again, some films are too much of a mess for general audiences. CRAZY EIGHTS definitely falls into that category.
Jennifer (Dinah Meyer, Birds of Prey, SAW), Lyle (George Newbern, FATHER OF THE BRIDE, Friends), Gina (Traci Lords, Melrose Place, First Wave), Wayne (Dan De Luca, The Wire), Brent (Frank Whaley, PULP FICTION, BROKEN ARROW), and Beth (Gabrielle Anwar, The Tudors, Burn Notice) are getting together for their friend’s funeral. Afterward they go to his house where he’s left them a box and a note with a map directing them to a time capsule they’d buried long ago. The search leads to an old barn where, while trying to move the chest outside, it breaks, and they discover the remains of a young dead girl in the bottom of the trunk. So far we’ve got the makings of a good horror movie.
While attempting to flee the scene, the group realizes they’re only driving around in circles, so they decide to follow a girl they see crossing the road and ask directions, only the girl disappears. They find instead an abandoned house where they think the girl may have gone. They break in and, while searching for the lights, Wayne falls and breaks his leg. Once the friends are all down in the basement to check on Wayne, the cellar doors slam shut and the group is forced to find another way out. A tunnel leading from the cellar takes them to what looks like an old hospital.
At first they all think that, while it’s creepy, the whole series of events is just one unfortunate circumstance after another until they all realize they’ve been here before. In fact, this is where they met. These six friends (seven if you count the dead one, eight if you count the body in the trunk), who called themselves the Crazy Eights when they were younger, had all spent time in this hospital as children, participating in “behavioral studies”. While they’ve blocked most of those memories, they’ve somehow retained enough to know they’ve been friends since childhood and were once called “Crazy Eights”.
And this is where the plot falls apart. Way too many unanswered questions plague CRAZY EIGHTS. How do they know they’ve been childhood friends if they don’t remember meeting in this hospital? If they recall enough to remember the time capsule–apparently not the body in the bottom of it–then surely they remember the hospital where it all started, wouldn’t you think? The movie attempts to address this issue but it comes too late and is stated too quickly then dropped–like all the other dangling threads of this movie–too swiftly to make any difference.
Basically what the entire movie boils down to is a bunch of people in a creepy location getting picked off one by one until the lone survivor is left. It’s typical slasher movie stuff, only a typical slasher movie has a plot that, while totally ridiculous, makes sense. Not so with CRAZY EIGHTS.
Some pretty recognizable faces are supposed to make it better, but all I could do was keep wondering how things got so bad for Dinah Meyer and Frank Whaley that they’re now making movies like this? Was the paycheck really THAT important? And then I thought, well, surely the thing made sense when they read it. I like to imagine writers Dan DeLuca and Jimi Jones showed the actors an awesome, haunting script, and that the thing only fell apart in the editing, but Jones contributed to the writing, directed the movie, and edited it. So maybe it was just a fractured mess from the beginning.
I wanted to like CRAZY EIGHTS. I tried like hell. It’s a good looking movie. The production design is creepy, the hospital is creepy, the ghost is creepy. Only a few of the deaths are shown, so the manner in which a couple of the characters bite it is left up to the viewer’s imagination, which is probably just as well. I have a feeling anyone watching this movie could dream up a more horrible death than anything Jones and De Luca could have devised. I got the feeling several times throughout that the people in charge only knew they wanted to be able to say “I made a horror movie”, but hadn’t put in the hours to figure out just what exactly that means, what makes a horror movie work. In a situation as unrealistic as this, logic must prevail and the thing just has to make sense–plausible even if not possible. But this just wasn’t.
Good idea, horrible execution.
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C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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