Wow! Such a good movie.

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Cody, Q, and Elroy are young bikers. They go to Cody's mother's birthday at her home with many other bikers. Q's girlfriend and Cody's cousin Shade joins them. There is Cody's ex Michelle with her sister Megan. As the party ends, the group is left at the house. Michelle becomes possessed and violent. As the situation deteriorates, a bright light flashes and a group seemingly from the 50s shows up taking everyone prisoner.It's not the best acted or the best written. The first half is still a good solid reasonable bloodfest. I like the splatter horror in an isolated location. The second half becomes unintelligible. It stops making sense when the other group shows up. The audience is simply left with the blood splatter orgy with a weird light show.

It's difficult to rate this film. First of all, it had a really nice vibe, in spite of the low budget and mediocre actors. In a world of movie recipes that result in the same regurgitated swill, this film rang original and true. However it is really hard to get past the boredom of the setup, which lasted for a third of the film and had no connection to the rest of the story, the lame rather than cheesy special effects and the bad acting.Also, it was one of those films that don't feel interactive. None of the characters seemed to have any choice in what was happening to them and, while it was relatively easy to identify with the characters, you couldn't see any solution or recourse to their plight as a viewer, either. Things just happened, without any explanation, then the movie ended, leaving much to be finalized. Is that a hint of a longer story arch, something like the Phantasm films? It did feel a little like a Coscarelli movie to me.The individual elements of the story were interesting enough, like the 50's angle, or the ending, or the motorcycle gang vibe, but I feel they were not put together right and it all fell short of what it could have been. The bottom line is that without the boring setup and with a little more work, this could have been a good Outer Limits episode. With better budget, this film could be redeemed by a well done sequel. Left alone, though, it might be a waste of time.

It's one thing to be the sort of crappy filmmakers who can't come up with enough story to fill up a feature length project so they just kill time with a bunch of pointless nonsense. It's another thing to be the sort of crappy filmmakers who can't come up with enough story to fill up a feature length project so they just kill time with a bunch of pointless nonsense…and then have the balls to acknowledge to the audience that's exactly what they did. If you admire that sort of proud defiance, maybe you could get into The Violent Kind. I prefer that when filmmakers suck and they know they suck, they should at least have the humility to try and cover it up.And before I get into the actual movie, let me clear something up. If you take a look at the DVD cover for this thing or the other promotional imagery, you may be fooled into thinking this is some sort of "Sons of Anarchy" knockoff with more graphic violence and actual nudity. Well, there is nudity. The violence, however, is honestly a bit tamer and less well done than you'll see on that FX show about biker Hamlet. Fundamentally, though, The Violent Kind isn't a biker flick at all. It's a low budget, sci-fi, end of the world horror film with just a hint of Lovecraft that uses bikers instead of teenagers as the victims de jour. The advertising for this name drops "Halloween" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", but it bears as much resemblance to those movies as Arnold Schwarzenegger does to Laurence Olivier. Having watched it, I fully understand why they felt it necessary to try and deceive people as to the nature of this motion picture. I would have preferred if they had just taken the footage and chucked it in the trash.The plot her is kind of insulting, so I'll leave that for last. What's best about The Violent Kind is the greasy nakedness of Tiffany Shepis and that Taylor Cole and Christian Prousalis, while remaining clothed, are both hot as hell and talented actresses. Granted, it's hard to judge given the material they have to work with, but they give the best performances in this thing by far. What's good here is Bret Roberts, who would have been great in an actual biker flick full of boobs, bullets and blood. Stuck in this exercise in genre cross-dressing, he really only highlights how little everything else works. What's okay in this mess is Cory Knauf as the hero and Joe Egender as the main villain. Every so often they give you a hint they might excel at these sort of roles, but Knauf can't rise above the sullen moroseness of his character and Egender is trapped within the forced and phony extremes of his.As for the bad? The Violent Kind looks cheap. Competent, but cheap. The most elaborate special effect in the whole shebang is a girl clinging to the ceiling, which is something most ambitious high school filmmakers could pull off nowadays. The make up effects barely pass muster and the camera work largely defines "no frills" in both execution and imagination. The dialog starts out banal and never gets any better. And as for the plot…oh, mercy me.Here's what you need to know about the plot. There's a long party scene at the beginning and a long torture scene at the end that are entirely superfluous and in between there's a fistfight that, hand on the Bible, is one of the dumbest scenes I've ever witnessed. Horror movie characters are renowned for doing idiotic stuff, but decapitated turkeys aren't as stupid as the two people here who decide to beat the snot out of each other in the middle of a supernatural crisis. The villains' plan to destroy the world is completely bizarre, but not in a "blow your mind" way. This kind of bizarre is more in the "the people who made this don't know what the hell they're doing" way. And to the extent there's any sort of subplot of personal conflict that plays out against the backdrop of the end of the world, it's manifested solely through the characters spouting expository sentences at each other.And if you want to know, The Violent Kind is about 3 bikers and 3 girls at a house in the woods who are set upon by aliens that are inhabiting the bodies of people who went missing in the 1950s. Why? Because the aliens have some time to waste before destroying humanity and decided that pretending to be a rockabilly tribute band at the end of a month long meth bender sounded like a great idea.So, to recap, The Violent Kind is being falsely marketed and it stinks. Even if Taylor Cole and Christina Prousalis had gotten naked, it still wouldn't have been worth watching. If they got naked and made out for 5 minutes? Eh, maybe.

This is a film that could almost be broken into three differently toned parts along the lines of a format similar to "A.I." and "Martyrs." Likewise, the first half seems conventional enough, the second half more dangerous and the third is about as bleak as they come--by the time it finishes, how it began will be a distant memory."The Violent Kind" starts out as a cool and sleazy afternoon in Oakland, CA with a posse of three young biker buddies belonging to "The Crew" who are without a care or concern except living up their own impulsive behavior from rough sex, fights to drinking beer. They go to Cody's mother's 50th birthday at an isolated house and instead of finding a bunch of well-behaved and mature adults, everybody celebrates with loud rock 'n' roll, more drinking and strippers. After almost everybody leaves, the real party just gets started, one where their livers aren't going to be the only things on the line.Cody's ex girlfriend returns a bloodied mess and asks for help. She's brought inside and placed in a bed until the remaining people left over--three guys, two gals--can figure out why their vehicles won't work and their cell phones act glitchy to get help as they're in the middle of nowhere. All the while the audience is shown mysterious others that hang outside in the shadows. They visit the only neighbor around and cryptic symbols are shown written on the walls in blood to allude to something ominous on the horizon. Soon enough things start to get really weird, as the woman on the bed turns Linda Blair-like possessed and with her bare hands mutilates one of the guys trying to get frisky and feel her up.Soon enough, the mysterious outsiders show up to the house to collect something they need. Though it's like they stepped into another era or some kind of paranormal realm as there are unexplained flashes of light and these new strangers appear to be ripped out of a time warp from the '50s with their distinct attire, tunes and lingo. They've got a dark and condescending sense humor that includes torturing their hostages while playing theme music on the record player and all the while laughing sardonically like they know a big secret their captives don't. They put on a sadistic show and fit their eccentric parts like a glove, though it's a rather pointless game except to show what kind of people they're dealing with: the violent kind.The first phase is more fleshed out and some perspective is gained of the young gang with some internal conflicts, though it's a different type of knowing as being familiar with their disregard for restraint sets a new bar for comfortable living at the expense of others as well as themselves. Everything is so rebellious, carefree and in-the-moment that it's hard to care of their safety or even their demise because they might have already had it coming. The next phase is going for mystery and cheap thrills by keeping the audience in the dark with only snippets of light to what, how or why these people are there. The ending gave a feeling of hopelessness as it left the audience as well as the characters out to dry. However, they made it too powerful and far reaching without actually showing the big picture and how these select people tie in, even if they seem incidental. It would be like watching "Night of the Living Dead," except where the TV and word of mouth by others are missing, which would leave the focus in one area but not effectively set up for how it all pans out or ties in to a global matter. Otherwise it feels exaggerated to stretch its importance."The Violent Kind" isn't going to be for everybody but it's definitely a different type of film which travels over a wide arc of genres and steps on any morals or taboos it can in the process. One of its setbacks is it felt like a condensed mini-series that gives assorted tastes of a little bit of here and there, but not enough to really appreciate and savor everything you just seen. It's entertaining to a degree, and with the change-ups I can't say it was boring, even if everything doesn't line up or is what it is anticipated to be. It gives some homage to other films and had some hiccups though all and all it did seem one of a kind. (Also submitted on http://fromblacktoredfilmreviews.blogspot.com/)