Director Matt Farnsworth and his team have been very busy in the past few years trying to create some internet buzz around their latest picture The Orphan Killer (originally titled Sibling: Marcus Miller The Orphan Killer, a title they wisely abandoned). Through online blogs and Facebook presence, they tried to get genre fans excited for Marcus Miller and his murderous endeavors. Proclaiming their movie "a tour de force murder flick that defies classification, goes far beyond current trends in gore and breaks open a new suffering genre of horror", they set expectations pretty high.
Audrey (Diane Foster) is a young ballet instructor at a very catholic high school. The building used to house an orphanage, were Audrey and her brother spent part of their childhood after seeing their parents brutally slain by a gang of thugs. This tragic event left Marcus with a few screws in his head severely loose, while Audrey remained an adorable little angel and thus easily adoptable. So while Audrey was quickly taken away towards a happy life of Barbie-dolls and tea parties, Marcus was left in the orphanage, where the good Lord's sisters tried to knock some sense into the disturbed little boy, Old Testament style. All grown up (and looking pretty hot), Audrey has forgotten all about her sibling, who over the years has turned into a gruesome urban legend. But now brother dearest is back with an impressive arsenal of sharp pointy objects and a chip on his shoulder the size of a small European country.
Now here's a horror movie that could have been really, really good, but simply, well
isn't. Marcus Miller's back story is fleshed out very well, as are the long flashbacks that tell us his tragic tale. Farnsworth creates a great villain with tons of potential, but doesn't know where to go with him. For the first 45 minutes, Marcus Miller is a stumbling, mumbling, growling, snorting, speechless behemoth of the Jason Voorhees variety. In fact, this part of the movie plays out as a later Friday the 13th sequel, with Miller offing various insignificant characters in not that innovative but rather gory ways. We are never even introduced to most of these characters; they are merely there to up the body count while Miller chases Audrey through the halls and corridors of the school for what seems like forever. Around the half way mark, when Audrey and Marcus start interacting face to face, our killer suddenly turns into an intelligent, one-liner spouting sadist, that goes all Jigsaw on his sister and various others. This is where the movie shines (although it doesn't really fit in with Miller's back story (in the flashbacks, the creepy little boy doesn't utter a word)), but it is over too soon and makes way for a pretty cliché final sequence.
While the kill scenes are all pretty okay, Farnsworth hasn't got a clue how the build any sense of dread or suspense, which makes the first part of the movie way overlong. It basically is just padding to stretch the movie into feature length. The same goes for some long but pointless birds-eye-view scenes of a city and a character driving a car, that serve no other purpose than broadcasting to the audience 'Look! Look how cool we are! We are filming from a friggin' Helicopter! How cool is that! Pretty darn cool, that's how cool!" Seems to me they could have better spent this budget on some of the special effects or set design, that is at points shaky at best. The same goes for some of the hand held camera-work. Viewers prone to seasickness need not apply.
The soundtrack almost completely consists of snippets of metal and hardcore songs. Totally my kind of music, but at points this approach is really inappropriate, especially during the flashback scenes. A bloody victim crawling up a flight of stairs to Walls of Jericho's melodramatic power balled 'No Saving Me' is unintentionally hilarious. There are more pieces of small ridiculousness. A human head that gets stomped on does not act like a deflating rubber ball, folks. And Marcus walking away from a rather bloody kill with an immaculately clean shirt, fold creases still in it like it just came from the wrapper, is side splittingly funny and incredibly stupid at the same time.
I've been pretty harsh on The Orphan Killer so far, when in fact I did have a pretty good time watching it. It's a decent little slasher, somewhat above average. More emphasis on the interaction between Marcus and Audrey would have helped a lot and I would have loved to have seen more of that awesome back story (where is Marcus' killing spree in the orphanage that made him a legend to begin with?). As it stands, a horror and gore fan could find less fun ways to spend 84 minutes than watching some dripping brains, dismemberment and pretty rad full frontal female nudity. However, "a tour de force murder flick that defies classification, goes far beyond current trends in gore and breaks open a new suffering genre of horror" this is not. Not by a long shot.
