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Review of Kolobos

Kolobos (1999)
3/10
Really confused & downright bad horror film that tries to be clever.
17 December 2005
Warning: Spoilers
Kolobos starts on a dark night as two people (Jeremy Kendall & Laura Holman) driving along run into an injured woman, she is taken to a local hospital where Dr. Waldman (Simms Thomas), an outpatient counsellor, tries to figure out who she is & how this woman had obtained some horrendous injuries... Five people, Kyra (Amy Weber), Tina (Promise LaMarco), Erica (Nichole Pelerine), Tom (Donny Terranova) & Gary (John Fairlie) have all answered an advert in a local newspaper advertising for people to spend some time in a house together with four strangers & have their every movement filmed, they are the chosen five. They all arrive & discover a large nicely furnished cabin which will be their home for the next few days. The director Carl (Jonathan Rone) explains to everyone what he is looking for & tells them all to relax, be natural & have fun. That night Tina heads into the kitchen to get some drinks when she is killed by spinning razor discs. Metal shutters suddenly descend over all the doors & window's trapping the four remaining inhabitants inside. As the night draws on it quickly becomes apparent that there is a killer in the house...

This German production was co-written & directed by the duo of David Todd Ocvirk & Daniel Liatowitsch &, in my humble opinion, is pretty crap, incidentally the word Kolobos apparently comes from the Greek word to self-mutilate so now you know. The script by Ocvirk, Liatowitsch & co-producer Nne Ebong is really slow to get going, the first murder doesn't happen until past the 40 minute mark & all I can say is do you want to sit through 40 odd minutes of highly annoying, boring & clichéd character development? I didn't think so. They are all here, the troubled yet strong female, the annoying wisecracking coward etc. etc. Kolobos is an absolute mess of a film with narrative that is all over the place & one of the worst endings ever, I was expecting some hip, cool twist that would hopefully lift the film a bit but it never came & what I got instead was a limp, lame & throughly lazy climax that holds no surprise apart from the fact that the filmmakers decided to go with it. Was it a dream, reality, a set up, what? To me everything that happened seemed to contradict itself during the climax, very frustrating & ultimately unsatisfying. To obviously keep the budget as low as possible only four character's are given any real screen time which is not good as they are all extremely unlikable. On a positive note at least it's a bit different, there are one or two decent scenes & strikes a certain cord with all the popular reality based shows currently playing on TV.

Directors Ocvirk & Liatowitsch (who had not made a film prior to Kolobos & thankfully not one since either) do absolutely nothing to liven the dull proceedings up, they aren't sure if they want a realistic hand held feel or not & in the end Kolobos has no style about it at all. They fail to create any tension or atmosphere as they think making the lights flash different colours is scary, guys it's not OK? The gore was disappointing after hearing good things about it, there a few splashes of blood, someone's stomach sliced open with a razor bladed Frisbee, a crappy looking melted face, a sliced ankle & a few other cheap looking effects like someone obviously sticking their head through a hole in a table to simulate a decapitated head & one terrible looking shot where someone's eye is impaled which is achieved by forced perspective.

Technically Kolobos is bland, uninteresting & dull with very little to talk about, so I won't. It was obviously shot on video rather than film which also adds to it's cheapness. The acting is pretty bad by everyone involved, they became very irritating & I ended up hating them all.

Kolobos had potential but it fails miserably in just about everything it sets out to do. The film is generally quite competent but that is about the best thing I can say about it. Definitely not worth 80 odd minutes of your life, there are better ways to spend it!
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