I needed a movie to watch last night, so I visited my local Redbox and browsed the titles it contained. Deranged immediately caught my attention because of its cover art: an attractive clownish woman covered in blood, perched on a swing in the middle of the woods. “This could be promising,” I thought. Here’s my thoughts now having viewed this movie.
Deranged is written by Oscar Carrion and Marcia Do Vales and is directed by Neil Jones. Cast members include Vales, Craig Fairbrass (Devil’s Playground), Victoria Broom (Stalled), Natalia Celino (The Harrowing), Tabitha Quitman, and Pablo Olewski.
The film follows, “four girls who go on a bachelorette party weekend to a country house, in rural Spain. Little do they know what someone has planned for them. The real party begins when the host is mysteriously attacked and one by one, the guests find themselves in mortal danger. The race is on to uncover the killer’s identity and they must fight back or be brutally murdered.”
Deranged has a score of 3.1/10 on IMDB, 2/5 on Amazon, and 2.3/5 on Rotten Tomatoes based on submitted reviews. The guys over at IMDB are being especially critical. Despite its faults and short comings, Deranged is not the piece of garbage or “worst film ever” that people on message boards are naming it to be. Those are just words from horror stans who think they know everything about making a horror film just because they’ve watched a couple dozen.
In my opinion, the only real problem Deranged has is that it brings absolutely nothing new to the table. The “group of friends go to a cabin” subplot has been done a million times before. It’s the easiest setting to put characters in peril. At this point, as a writer and director, you need to have a unique element to your story to keep the viewers interested. Twenty minutes into the movie I was losing interest fast and was mostly on my phone until the first girl died. The other problem with this movie is that the characters are mostly unredeemable in terms of quality and that means you will want them to die instead of routing for them. These are two of the biggest flaws that lower the quality of a horror movie in my opinion.
With that aside, Deranged is still shot beautifully. I mean from a technical standpoint the film is well done. The special effects are pretty decent. And, save for one actress, the cast is professional and realistic enough. This was an independent, foreign production, and that how it feels. People who understand that not all horror films are filmed with ten million dollar budgets in America will probably enjoy this movie to an extent. I’m going to give it a 5.2 out of 10. Lost a lot of points because of the slow, overused pace and characters I couldn’t relate to, but it’s still far from the worst movie ever.
