Duck:Carbine High Massacre

Rating:
Summary: WOW
Review: I got this movie in hopes that it would be an actual movie, about the shooting at columbine in 1999... There are a string of School Shooting movies, most are Indie, because those are the only people with the guts to make a movie about a School Shooting.

I've seen Hostage High, Elephant, HomeRoom, Zero Day, and Carbine High. Each one showed something slightly different. I think Zero Day is the cloest we will ever get to a Block Buster movie about the shooting, which is also why the Movie will no doubtly never be released... Elephant has almost no acting in it, and just shows a normal day at school. HomeRoom is more about coping with the horror, and Hostage High is about a different shooting.

That leaves Carbine High as the only decent movie even close to the story of Columbine. It is done rather rediclous at points. It exaggrates events to unbelievable levels. They make fun of many parts of society, many sterotypes. Throughout the Movie, you watch two Boys who are picked on, who love fireworks, have an interest in Nazi Germany, and have suicidal thoughts. These are the only two characters of the movie that are even called by their names.

Everyone else is referred to by their sterotype names such as "The bible Girl", "The Jock", "The Retard"... At first I thought it was creepy, but in reality it is just South Park level of exaggration added into dramatic events, to show you how rediclous things really are...

I gave the Movie 5 Stars, because it throws political correctness out window, and shows you the truth in a simpleton way....

Rating:
Summary: duck and cover, duck and cover
Review: I had a friend buy this for me years ago on VHS. It was one of my most prized possessions! I thought, "FINALLY a movie making fun of Columbine! a movie showing the perspective of the shooters!!". I think it should be shown in every school. It will never happen.. but it's a nice thought.

People need to think about things from more angles than just the typical, "boo hoo, people died". There's a reason those people died. It is too often ignored. Yes, this movie will be offensive to some! Yes, this film will only be funny to those with a slightly morbid sense of humor.. but the fact still remians, somebody was bound to make a film like this sooner or later.. and I, for one, am glad they did.

Rating:
Summary: Junk
Review: The atrocity that unfolded at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999 stuns the mind. Even now, more than five years after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold donned their black trench coats and went on a killing spree, we don't fully understand what motivated the pair to embark on a nightmare. The media, always quick to swoop down on a tragedy in order to throw blame around (and score some high ratings in the process), pointed their fingers at a host of social and psychological factors. Violent videogames, absentee parents, National Socialism, death metal music, bullying--all of these reasons, and a few more, issued forth from the "experts" consulted in the wake of the tragedy. Then the conspiracy nuts weighed in, those misguided, endearing souls who throw up web pages explaining the "real" story behind any national calamity. According to these crackpots, it's an absolute fact that Harris and Klebold had several as yet unknown accomplices helping them place the homemade bombs around the school. If you look hard enough, you might even see a few sinister references to an alien (as in extraterrestrial) influence in the disaster. Amazing, isn't it? Perhaps we will never understand why Columbine occurred.

Don't expect any answers from "Duck! The Carbine High Massacre." This micro budget, shot on video production from the warped minds of William Hellfire and Joey Smack runs through the gamut of possible causes. And it does so in the most sensationalistic way possible. Derwin (Hellfire) and Derick (Smack) play two down on their luck losers suffering their way through a high school experience overflowing with loutish brutes and snobby girls. We meet a few of them right from the start, but none of them have names. They go by monikers like Bible Girl (Misty Mundae), Afro-American (Kendall Ward), Car Kid (Chris Perez), and Play Girl (Lilly Tiger). The film reduces them to nothing more than one-dimensional figures, hence Car Kid makes a big deal about his spiffy car, Bible Girl spends every waking moment trying to convince fellow classmates to attend a Bible study group, and Afro-American complains about white people. All of these kids share one common trait: they are shallow jerks. You would think Bible Girl would take a wholesome, friendly attitude towards her fellow humans. You would be wrong. She's just as nasty as the rest of the lot, and all of them despise Derwin and Derick. Whether the taunts take place in the classroom or out in the parking lot, everyone seems to have it in for these two.

After Car Kid and a couple of his cronies beat Derwin to a bloody pulp one day after school, going so far as to carve the word "freak" into his stomach with a knife, Derwin and Derick begin to plot their revenge. Actually, they have been knocking around the idea of doing some serious damage to their fellow students for some time, having purchased a nuclear warhead from China over the Internet that didn't exactly work (!?!). The beating is the final straw, so the two head over to a music club to purchase weapons from some mafia type sitting in a back room. Now heavily armed, they march into the cafeteria the next day (it looks like a gymnasium with a sheet thrown up so we can't see the bleachers) and proceed to terminate with extreme prejudice Car Kid, Bible Girl, and every other caricature in their sights. They even blast a mentally handicapped kid in a wheelchair. Of course, the media shows up and starts filming the unfolding carnage. Cameras capture a wounded student running out of the building clutching his stomach, and replay it on an endless loop for the bread and circus crowd at home. The film ends in much the same the Columbine nightmare ended, and that's enough said about that.

"Duck! The Carbine High Massacre" fails miserably on most levels. The shoddy, dirt-cheap production values look like shoddy, dirt-cheap production values. Acting, if you wish to call it that, uniformly tanks. The most egregious "performances" come from a teacher and the principal, two guys who achieve such wooden levels of speech and body language that the Screen Actors Guild ought to put out a contract on them. Hellfire and Smack could have propped up a couple of those cigar shop Indians in their place and I wouldn't have noticed the difference. As for Misty Mundae, well, she doesn't look that great and doesn't act worth a toot. I know this gal has legions of fans out there, but in this movie she just doesn't cut the mustard. Perhaps the worst crime "Duck!" commits is its failure to adopt a serious attitude about the movie. In the extras on the disc, both filmmakers mouth platitudes about how they made a film that digs deep to expose how the media fed off the disaster, but we soon learn that Hellfire and Smack are doing the same thing. Don't believe me? Check out the deleted scenes on the disc, especially the one called "One last thing." Real cool comments at the end, you guys. "We're just trying to make a few bucks like everyone else," says Hellfire. I hope you lose money.

The gore at the end is appropriately repellent, but everything else makes you feel so dirty that enjoying the mayhem feels like a crime. Supplemental features include deleted scenes, interviews with the filmmakers, information about their incarceration for making the movie, music videos from Today is the Day and King Ghidorahi, trailers for the film, a separate movie soundtrack, and trailers for the movies "Fudoh," "Blood Feast 2," "Flesh for the Beast," and "Visitor Q," two of which are much better than this picture. I recommend watching Gus Van Sant's "Elephant," a movie I thought did a much better job of trying to show the horror of that dark day.