This movie is a wacky ride with a diabolical twist (that might make zero sense but is still very fun). This is also one of those, “Pause the video, zoom in, and enhance,” kind of magic police software movies. The night vision setting is just like inverted color (black and white), their reasons for using the POV cameras don’t make a lick of sense, and also just HOW. The first time I saw this movie, years ago, I was blown away by the plot twist and let it cloud my judgement on rating the film (that and thinking no one would ever see my ratings) but I can see clearly now.
⭐⭐⭐
Trigger Warning Child Abduction, Child Death
We see some gnarly establishing shots of a crazy scene in the desert just outside of Las Vegas (there is even a disembodied arm, Shirley Jackson wishes). Radha Mitchell, who we know and loathe (I mean, love) from the Silent Hill movies, bursts into a room at a police station with other police type characters and they begin watching footage that was recovered from the scene of the crime. We meet the other main characters of the movie who are two girls who have connected dreams, one plans to be a famous actress while the other plans to be a famous director. Together they will make their dreams come true! Also together they plan a fun trip with some friends as well as some completely random lady who just carries around a satchel full of cash (and that is her whole personality). They sort of explain what the trip is for and all that (blah blah blah) but for the life of me I don’t believe it is ever addressed why the woman with the big bag of moolah is there acting up on these twenty-somethings fun Vegas trip. ANYWAY, they never make it to Vegas (or wherever the hell the end destination was, because they run over just a ton of barbed wire just in the middle of the desert. They also completely crashed out because of this and they did it in the most budget friendly way possible, the camera glitched for a few seconds and then suddenly the bus was upside down. Only one person was even a little hurt and she just had a minor cut on her leg or something. They all got out of the bus and walked back to a ghost town they had just passed.
This is where things start to get interesting, people start doing their own things, separating, the lady with her bag of money just keeps holding her bag of money (as I said, it was her whole personality). Then… Suddenly… And without warning… The youngest kid of the group bursts out of a doorway covered in blood, he had been stabbed multiple times by an unknown assailant and basically had enough life left in him to SPRINT past the director girl, fall down outside, and pretty much just die there. He could give no indication to who (or what?) killed him. From here on out things get really crazy and I’ll be honest, I sort of lose track of who dies when, BUT the important thing to remember is that they all die (most of them). We also get to see the assailant around now too, it is someone wearing welding gear, complete with the mask, and he has a welding torch that he is using to attack people. The bus driver says that he can rewire the phone in the ghost town to work, he just needs some wires from the bus (“because there are no wires in the whole town?” my frustrated boyfriend asks the screen). The driver and the director go back to the bus but while there the driver is attacked, we just see his bloody hands pressed up against the glass and he is gone (presumed dead). Director girl is attacked by the Mad Welder but somehow escapes? When she returns, alone, her actor friend isn’t there anymore, it is just the mother character and the money bag lady. The mother character tells a sad story about her child but I don’t know if we can be very invested in any of that at this point in this weird movie.
(I might be mixing up the order of operations here but the gist is the same) Our Mad Welder shoots at the remaining folks with a flare gun which scares them quite badly. They run away and even find the actor girl! They look outside with their night vision and see that the bad guy dropped the flare gun and decide unanimously that they NEED to have it (but why? Do they have any more flares? How is getting the flare gun going to help them?). The mom character goes outside to grab the gun, she has a camera so can technically see what's going on around her but doesn’t a) look around or b) hurry the fuck up so the welder guy just walks up to her, smashes her head on some glass and then casually torches her arm off? With a clean cut? In what world? ANYWAY. The driver comes BACK , He Never Died. The girls (the only two left, the actor and director) are very shocked to see him alive, (they find the money bag lady dead in the bathroom). They are trying to escape and are running but then suddenly the actor lady turns around and starts going the other way. Then the director is all alone, she tries to fix the phone the way the driver had mentioned, red wire to red wire, green to green, but the welder comes after her again! She makes a valiant attempt to get away but in the end he barbeques her! This is where the tape ends. The detectives uncover some more tapes that show how the money bag lady was killed in the bathroom and how the first boy was stabbed.
At some point near the end of their little movie marathon all the footage of these heinous happenings are leaked to the internet (and we know how the internet loves a snuff film). The detectives think it has to be an internal leak but cannot be sure. The salt-of-the-earth male detective who came in to work this case, even though he’s on leave, goes in to talk with one of the only survivors, the actor, she is shaken very badly. They have a conversation about the little pink watch on his wrist. Turns out he had a daughter and one day while he was at the mall letting her play she was abducted, she was only found later after she was murdered. This is a bit of a sobering piece of real life tragedy in the midst of a sort of goofy movie where limbs can be cleanly lobbed off with welding tools but let us continue. Something the actor says triggers the detective to check one of the victims mouths and low and behold, there was an SD card in there. They had one more tape to view. They think they are at the bottom of the case when a new news report comes out that bloopers were posted from the snuff film. Turns out, the folks behind it, the ones pulling all the strings, the ones who were wearing the welding mask, were the actor and director. They planned the whole thing, they buried the barbed wire, they made their movie. This was a very fun twist, quite evil indeed, if, of course, you suspend your disbelief that no one clocked that these two petite girls weren’t obviously petite girls when they put on the welding gear. Whomever this film actually hired to file out the welding suit was almost certainly a man or at least a substantial woman because the welder had a formidable frame. Certainly silly to think about but I still think this movie was a lot of fun.
Second part as promised. I added two more from the proposal because there weren't that many good scenes to gif on the second part of the movie. Again, I apologize for the quality. There are 8 gifs of 500px width under the cut. Please like or reblog if using.
Thanks to my friend Megan, I've recently developed an obsession with Nolan Funk, and I'm so thankful for that cause the guy is gorgeous. Anyhow, I was watching Evidence the other day, and there were really worthy scenes in there to gif, mostly to use for roleplaying porpuses, but saddly there are just two photosets from it in Tumblr, and the gifs are small (though that didn't stop me form using them). Never made gifs on PS before but I decided to give it a try so Megan and I could have more resources to use in our RPs. And since I'm sure many other roleplayers would probably want them as well, I'm sharing these with the community.
Part II can be found here.
There are 14 gifs of 500px width under the cut. Please like or reblog if using. I didn't make that many, so if you watched the movie and there's a part of one of those scenes that you want me to gif (more proposal ones or grumpy!Tyler on the bus perhaps), just let me know. Part II coming up around these days. I apologize for some crappy quality ones, I'm still learning
