Search - Bachelor Party in Bungalow of The Damned on DVD

Steven H. (sehamilton) from BIRMINGHAM, AL
Reviewed on 7/22/2011...

Anyone would be hard-pressed to consider the trio of strippers in this feature "sexy". Far from it; not that you see much of them anyway. Despite a minimal budget and lame plot, this film actually features some half-decent actors and some riotous lines. Definitely not scary (I'm going to start differentiating between horror and scary films; it is abundantly clear the two are not the same), but there are plenty of snide laughs. The deadpan delivery of the lines is the only reason to watch this movie. If you're looking for skin, you'll be disappointed.

Laugh, cringe and get ready to be terrified!

Collette Diebold | 09/12/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"In this indy horror flick, you get it all! I was pleasantly surprised with the level of acting as well as the storyline. The effects were awesome and I was thoroughly entertained. There aren't too many movies out there that incorporate demonic boobs and well executed acting!

A must see for any indy horror lovers out there!
"

Blah.

Robert P. Beveridge | Cleveland, OH | 03/30/2009

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned (Brian Thomson, 2008)

When correctly mixed, comedy and horror go together like peanut butter and cheddar. (Well, okay, so my daughter tells me.) Just ask Dan O'Bannon or Peter Jackson, the makers of such classic comedy-horror combos as Return of the Living Dead and Dead Alive, both of which are hysterical and horrific. When it doesn't work, on the other hand, you have the cottage industry known as Troma. And, yes, there are wannabe-Tromas out there. One of them is Brain Damage Films, who released this particular movie, which fails at being either funny or scary.

Plot: Sammy (Gregg Aaron Greenberg), the best man at Chuck (Joseph Riker)'s upcoming wedding, has arranged a golf outing for the two of them and their friends Fish (Gelu Dan Rusu) and Paulie (Sean Parker) as a bachelor party. Plans change, of course, without Chuck knowing, and the foursome end up a fivesome when Gordon (Joe Testa), on whom they all picked in high school, offers up the use of his uncle's place in the Hamptons. Sammy arranges for some exotic dancers to come over, and, well, you know what bachelor parties are like. Except there's more to these exotic dancers than meets the eye...

which is good, because very little of these exotic dancers at all meets the eye. Which is bad, because the main exotic dancer is played by Zoe Hunter (by far the most experienced actor in the bunch, save a five-second Lloyd Kaufman cameo), who qualifies as jaw-droppingly hot on the scale of Gillian Anderson or Heather Branch. A bit more nudity would only have been welcome. (And it is, after all, a movie about a bachelor party containing strippers. One expects them to, you know, strip.) Then the comedy, which hasn't been funny at all, changes to horror, which isn't scary at all. Thomson attempts to use the Val Lewton technique of "put it in shadow if you can't afford it", but has nowhere near the lighting skills to pull off Lewton-style effects; things are just murky rather than scary.

Despite all this, however, the biggest problem this movie has, for me, is that first time writer/director Thomson doesn't really understand if he wants this movie to focus on any particular character or whether he wants to use an ensemble-cast approach. Because of this, characters' roles shift in importance throughout the movie, which can be really, really annoying at times; characters who you didn't think you had to expend any mental energy on at all are suddenly in the central role, while others who dominated other parts of the movie are relegated to the background. This is almost always a sign of inexperience and overreaching on the part of the author, and given that this is Thomson's first work, I assume that's the case here. While I have to give him points for aiming for the stars-- an ensemble-cast presentation is a really tough thing to pull off successfully-- I have to take most of those points away for the finished product missing the mark so terribly.

Not awful if you have nothing else to do on a Saturday night, but like all the Brain Damage movies I've seen, don't go out of your way to check this out. * ½

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