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"Sweet Insanity" DVD
If you remember the title
as being part of a theme song from an eighties sitcom, you’re
sadly not alone. That’s the way I remember them, and frankly,
after seeing the waste of DVD plastic that “Sweet Insanity”
represents, I think the title would’ve been better used as
part of schmaltzy eighties sitcoms.
“Sweet Insanity” is the dull and plodding mess of a
story that involves a bunch of high school kids getting murdered
semirandomly for what only seems like no reason, until the last
fifteen minutes or so, when there will prove to be a reason, but
it will be so poorly explained that it’s next to impossible
to follow
Especially through the massive, angry haze of boredom that the entire
first half hour will generate.
The first five minutes are a little misleading, but then, that turns
out to be a fair representation of this movie in general. We start
off with a dream sequence that’s mostly scary, but in the
end, turns out to be just laughable. Continuing on, we get a minor
psychology lesson, and then some cartoon character of a high school
student screaming about what his first time on ecstacy was like.
Surprisingly, this turns out to be the biggest problem with “Sweet
Insanity”-- the first twenty minutes are just some mammoth
high school drama movie, and only after the first twenty-five percent
of the movie is down do we even have a killer appear to distinguish
the movie from, say, a particularly low budget version of “Clueless”.
And yes, I saw “Clueless”—what? Alicia Silverstone
is hot, dammit!
But I digress. In general, it’s just a bad idea to set your
horror / thriller movie up in such a fashion that there are neither
thrills nor horror to be found until you’ve finished a quarter
of your run time.
Worse yet, what tension there is after the twenty minute mark comes
in small bursts, never really allowing the viewer to work up sufficient
tension to be, you know, scared. Which is sort of a prerequisite
for any half-decent horror / thriller movie—the audience should
probably be scared at some point.
I spent the first half of “Sweet Insanity” thinking
about lunch. And that’s never a good sign.
And then, almost by way of apology, “Sweet Insanity”
trots out a brief but very subdued lesbian make-out scene at forty
three minutes fifty three seconds. Sorry folks, nice try, but distinctly
not enough.
There’s an excellent example of how the tension in this movie
is allowed to build and then die off in the sequence between forty
eight and forty nine minutes. Watch and see what I mean—something
scary happens, and then we boil off into some pointless bit of high
school drama.
Finally, we get to the ending of this sludge pit of a movie, dragging
ourselves through it like walking in waist-deep butterscotch, and
we get to a major plot point of the movie with just over twenty
minutes left. A real shocker, too, that manages to explain a couple
little things that were going on over the course of the movie. Why
did it take us so damnably long just to get to this particular plot
point that explains some little details?
The rest of the ending is much the same way—the action finally
gets started, some kids start dropping over, and the killer runs
amok. Until the very end…when we’re in an insane asylum…and
one of the kids…is…in a…straitjacket? Wait, what
the hell was that? Comprehension for the last two minutes just falls
through the floor. In fact, you’re probably going to be hard
pressed to tell just what happened in the last three minutes. If
it even happened at all.
The special features include director’s commentary, audio
options, deleted scenes, Spanish subtitles, and some screeners.
All in all, “Sweet Insanity” is much like high school
itself—far too slow, ridiculously underpowered, dull as dishwater
and by the end, someone’s going to wind up in a looney bin.
Sadly, my money’s on the audience.
Sweet
Insanity
*
DVD
Directed by Daniel HessWritten by Adam Weis, Daniel Hess
Starring Mackenzie Firgens, Rebekah Isaacs, Corbett Tuck, David
Fine
Produced by George Dykstra
80 mins
R
2006
The
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