Project Terrible: Evil Weed (2009)

So far I have been lucky this Project Terrible round, and the creator of this whole mess, Mondo Bizarro, may have thought he was torturing me here with Evil Weed - and really, how could he not, given the movie's premise? - but this movie was a huge surprise in how not bad it was. In fact, the movie was not bad enough. Read on to find out what I mean...

A group of rich snobs from the city drive out to a friend's secluded vacation home for the weekend. The boyfriend of one girl brings some wicked bad dope to the party, not knowing that it has somehow been "tainted" in the farm where it was growing in Mexico. Now the weird reactions from the mary jane are turning the group into something definitely not human with the need to kill.

Evil Weed gets the award for being the first movie that I've ever wanted to be worse than it actually was. Seriously, this movie would have been so much better - and frankly a lot more fun - if it just sucked a little more, or was a little more stupid and campy. I mean, what do you expect a movie called Evil Weed to be like? Shitty acting, horrible dialogue, a bad plot, and gore effects with nothing but ketchup and trick knives, right? But in reality, Evil Weed doesn't really have any of these and it's a shame.

Project Terrible movies or those so-bad-it's-good movies are supposed to be fun to make fun of. So I was looking forward to a bunch of slacker dopeheads acting like complete idiots while they deliver the most ridiculous lines of dialogue you've ever heard. Instead, the unknown actors in this piece (some with 10 dollar names like Genevieve Hudson-Price) seem to have really taken this project seriously. I mean, there are no Oscar performances here, but I have seen much, much worse. Aside from the occasional bout of over-acting, these people did a good job. Their reactions are real and believable, surprisingly not over-hysterical, although their decisions about dealing with the situation are half-assed. 

There are only two scenes of people actually smoking the evil weed and the filmmakers tried to make these scenes look all trippy and psychedelic, with the actors wearing these joke glasses and making all these weird camera effects. When they finally "turn" from the effects of the pot, they bleed from the mouth a bit, have these glowy eyes, and grow these claws on their fingers that look like the bark from a tree (?). Then they slink around on all fours like an animal and attack people. That's it. I don't know if this makes sense for the plot of the movie or not because it is never really explained just how the weed got tainted in the first place. There's a scene at the beginning that tries to do this by showing the guys at the pot farm shooting at something off-camera and the blood spatters onto the pot leaves. We don't know what the thing is and the filmmakers never feel the need to flesh that out so that's all we're left with.

The gore is minimal and not that exciting. One guy gets attacked in the pool with an infected chick slashing away at him with her bark-claws but you don't really see anything. The guy who causes the whole problem - the one who brought the pot - is dispatched of in the most ridiculous way. After he's been infected and hides out in the woods, the blonde girl Emily is walking around all cautious-like with a shovel for a weapon. You think she's ready for some action and is looking to kill him, but when he attacks her, she runs away and then DROPS THE SHOVEL. Oh, but don't worry, when he catches up to her, she finds a much better weapon - a stick. No, seriously. She picks up the thinnest stick ever and somehow manages to impale him through the chest with it. I think I would have much preferred the death by shovel because, oh I don't know... you can't impale somebody with a stick, maybe??!! Then at the end the last infected girl is killed when the survivors run over her with their car. And again, they somehow manage to completely obliterate her body - the aftermath is all severed hands and innards and goop - when they were only driving about 10 mph. 

On the technical side of things, there are definitely places where Evil Weed could be improved upon. In some shots, they use this weird jerky digital effect that I couldn't stand, and since they only use it sporadically the choice is inconsistent and it doesn't make sense just what they were trying achieve with it. Sometimes the shot compositions are absolutely terrible and when they try to shoot in the dark, the outcome is not that professional looking, but I'm thinking that there probably wasn't a huge budget for this movie anyway. I can let that go for now. Male viewers might like the wardrobe because the girls spend the entire movie in their bikinis.

I really thought this movie was going to be worse, and I hope you understand when I say that it probably would have been better if it was worse. I expected to be laughing at stupid dialogue and horrible acting and improbable death scenes (okay, the stick thing counts for that) but I wasn't laughing at all because the movie is a touch too serious. Sure, the whole concept of the tainted pot turning these guys into monsters is ridiculous and funny, but this movie needed more camp - like Return to Sleepaway Camp (pun intended). Did you see that movie? That is what Evil Weed needed to be, but it just doesn't go there.