13 Eerie: 63 Out Of 100 Stars

Canadian horror film that has a decently fresh premise and despite it's many flaws, turns out to be pretty enjoyable, even if a lot of that enjoyment comes directly because of the flaws. You know it's a Canadian movie when two of the first five credits go to Brendans.

A group of young forensic science students are on a training course on a remote island that used to house a prison. Rumor has it that a lot of the death row inmates were subjected to insane experiments and devious torture. I think you can see where this is going.

So the 6 students, A professor who does everything by the book and will brook no guff, and a local jack of all trades there to help set things up all make their way to the remote camp. Nick Moran is awesome as the local, who right away senses that shit isn't right, and while he helps carry the early part of the movie it does come at the expense of just about any character development for anyone else in the film. I mean, there's barely even cursory cliche dialog between the students.

So the prof has set up three different crime scenes around the island, using actual corpses with the help of a local lawman, and the students split up into three teams of two and head out to meet their doom.

The film looks good for the most part, and the acting, save for a few wooden performances from the students, is solid enough. The pacing is very well done and at just over 80 minutes it never feels stretched out. The thing that makes 13 Eerie really stand out though is that the baddies are really awesome. The mutant humans look and act legit terrifying, and the gore is top notch. The kills are good, but even the bad ones are fun. Such as when a grown woman, running for her life, cannot avoid getting stuck in a thorn bush, unable to move when a cannibal corpse comes to eat her. The monster then takes it's time eating select pieces of the this dumb broad while she continues to be perilously trapped by twigs and screams not so much as if she's being eaten alive but more like she just saw a mouse.

The bad? Well there's an infuriating hum that some might call a soundtrack, that blares distortingly in moments of tension and drowns out a lot of the dialog. Both unforgivable and nerve wracking.. Then there's the complete lack of character development. The only one in the group you end up having any rooting interest in is the hot girl, for no other reason really other than she's hot. The last half hour just isn't as much fun as it could have been if I had given much of a fuck who lived and died, but cest la vie.

A little short on story, but high on atmosphere, with enough blood and guts to keep things moving along, 13 Eerie is a decent romp with the undead.