Branded (2006)

Credits / Details

30%
Overall Rating

Ranked #13,882
...out of 20,698 movies

Genres: Horror Slasher Film

Mitch discovers that you can't run from evil when it owns you. He learns someone has manipulated him, pulling him deeper into their twisted world of drugs and sex. Who it is will shock him and what he must do will lead him to the edge of insanity. They are connected - and death is connected to them... --IMDb

Review by Chad
Added: December 23, 2006

Christmas is just a couple of days away, and most of the other webmasters out there are acknowledging this fact through their sites, be it through holiday-themed graphics, reviews of Christmas films, or maybe just a simple little message at the top of the page. I'm going to skip over all of that nonsense and give you a real Christmas treat: a story culled from my very own childhood. This story begins back when I was just moving into those teen years, a time when I happened to be a fan of heavy metal music. Death metal, black metal, thrash, grindcore, it didn't matter: if it could make your ears bleed, I was into it. One year, with Christmas approaching and everyone being in the gift-giving mood, a friend of mine who knew how much I enjoyed this music (but didn't know anything about it) decided to pick me up a CD as a present. To say that I was intrigued was an understatement: perhaps she picked me up some rare import (her family was loaded, after all), or maybe it's some new band that I've never heard of, or... well, the questions were racing through my mind as I tore apart the wrapping paper. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be a Winger CD. I never did let on my disgust at having to bring this into my humble abode and for all she knew, I was thrilled with her selection, but deep down, I really wanted to explain to her how god-awful that present really was.

By this point, you're probably wondering why I'm rambling on about an event that happened to me over a decade ago in a movie review. The point is that after watching this movie, I sort of feel the same way... but this time, I don't have to bite my tongue for fear of hurting someone's feelings. But first, the obligatory plot detailing.

The movie begins with a man being arrested for murder, and throughout his handcuffed walk to the police car, he's having some pretty bizarre hallucinations. There's also a crowd of people behind a police barricade chanting "Carnal Fear!" at him for reasons that are unknown to us at home, but all will be explained in due time. Actually, they'll be explained about five minutes after this scene; you see, this happens in the future, and the entire movie that we're about to witness is a flashback to the events that led up to this arrest. This man is introduced to us as Mitch Steiger (Trey Fillmore), the main member of a band called Carnal Fear that is well on their way to becoming heavy metal superstars. Before that can happen, however, they have to record their second album, no easy task considering that the group can't quit arguing with one another and the band manager (Dana Pike) is a tyrannical bitch.

These are typical band problems, sure, but things take a turn towards the abnormal when drummer Crash (Jamie Sworski) kills his groupie girlfriend. Well, I take that back: apparently, he didn't actually kill her (as is revealed later in the movie), but instead, he merely tied her up, somehow got her blood all over him, and dumped her body in the lake. I understand the concept of a red herring, but this was definitely pushing it. Anyway, the police are closing in on the band after the body turns up, and all the while, a masked lunatic keeps a couple of bikini-clad women locked up in a shed so that he can torture them and record their screams of pain. Whoever could it be, and why are they recording these shrieks onto a cassette deck?

There are times that I really don't even know where to begin with a review. This usually only happens when a movie is phenomenally great or absolutely wretched, and right now, I have no clue where to begin - I'll leave it up to you, the reader, to take a stab at why that's the case. How about I start with the many botched "red herring" characters and why I felt that they didn't work out as expected? Now, I'm not claiming to be a great script-writer, but I do know my slasher films: therefore, this is merely how I saw the characters, and I won't hold it against the film. Oh, screw it: yes, I will hold it against the film since my six-year-old daughter could have figured this shit out. You've got six suspects in total: the four band members, the black cop, and the manager. One of the band members was shown being arrested to kick off the movie, so that's too obvious - it can't be him. The other "main" band member was ruled out early on when he was shown being somewhere else when the torturing sequences began, so we can knock his name off the list (even though we clearly saw him dumping a body in the lake). The other two band members barely get a half-dozen lines combined throughout the movie, so they're obviously not important in the grand scheme of things - two more names crossed off. The killer is white, so the black cop is no longer a suspect, and that leaves us with... well, I won't come right out and spoil it, but you do the math. My problem with this aspect of the film isn't that it was blatantly obvious, it was the fact that we have to suffer through about an hour of endless detective work as the cast tries to piece together the clues that we at home figured out during the first twenty minutes.

Perhaps I could have overlooked this if the movie had something else going on for it, but sadly, it wasn't to be. With the exception of the talented Jamie Sworski, the acting flat out sucked even by b-movie standards. Bad acting is normally acceptable for me in the world of low-budget horror, but it's hard to ignore when the vast majority of the movie centers around the characters talking and playing Scooby Doo. Maybe there's some gore to be found to make up for it? No sir: we get one shoddy death sequence and a couple of laughably-bad torture scenes. That's it, nothing else to see here. The only thing saving this film from that rare "0/10" rating were some neat flashback sequences and a story that showed some promise, but a couple of neat visuals and a heavily-botched telling of said story doesn't go too far in my eyes.

Overall, I see this movie in much the same way as that horrid Christmas experience from my younger years. It's obvious that those involved wanted to create a classic Slayer album, but in the end, it's nothing but another fucking Winger CD. 2/10.

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