Bad Reputation (2005)

Very Cool!!!

Admirable film.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Blistering performances.

Horrible movie, just plain AWFUL. This movie sucks almost worse than Titanic. Almost. Not only is the acting bad, but you quickly grow to hate the actors as well, all of them. The cinematography is also absurdly bad. The worst of all is probably the sound. Obviously the idiots that made this crap have idea what in the sam hill they're doing. The movie sounds awful! Every single person that appears in this film is obviously an idiot in real life too. If you were to find the stupidest people you could find, then hit them in the head with a hammer 20 times, then you would get close to how stupid the people are in this movie. This movie sucked a lot in many ways. Really, really, really bad and awful.

A shy girl gets invited to party by a jock, just to get raped by him and his friends. The jock's girlfriends are too dumb to accept that she's a victim and start branding her as a slut at the school. There's gonna be hell to pay. Basically, this is Carrie on a budget. It would be quite good, were it not for the unsubtle interpretation of the lead actress, whose character development is too extreme and rushed to help with her already limited acting abilities. She's never believable and as a result, it's impossible to root for her and relish her murderous ploy for vengeance. The supporting players, though, are almost all uniformly good, and help carry the movie to completion. A curiosity.

The plot strives for shock value over the kind of brilliant sum of subtle intellectual thrills that make great movies. The sexual assault scene felt appropriately long; this is the sort of thing that should make everyone in the audience feel disgusting. The compounding events after said scene were unnecessary, and made it feel as if I were being hit over the head with the horror of the female lead's experience (the writer seems to be telling us that if we didn't think rape and being blamed for it were bad, we should feel sorry for the lead's having to ask for her purse, not being able to start her car right away, and having an utterly stupid mother-character). The lead's embrace of her reputation trivializes her horrifying experience at the hands of three evil young men. The murder-as-revenge thoroughly disrespects the lead's purported intelligence. I could go on.The acting, editing, and directing is amateurish.The script feels forced and unrealistic.If you like the more ridiculous slasher movies out there or read supermarket paperbacks, go for it. If not, please don't waste your time.-Sean

This is probably the lowest I've seen in budgets on film. It's not bad visually. But, man it hurts my ears throughout most of the movie. I should have brought my ear plugs. The sound technicians needed to work on those certain echoes on those certain details in each scene, and the car noises in the background suddenly changes in between takes. That got annoying, but I had to suck it up, and watch the rest of the movie with the volume turned down. Not much blood for this slasher film as implied on the cover. But that didn't really matter to me. The movies biggest strength was the dialog and it was rather witty and intriguing to hear what the characters would say next. Character development for the teens were actually pretty darn good. Especially for the character Michelle and the guy who gang banged her with his buddy. Revenge is always stimulating as in most revenge films. But it wasn't really worth watching again. Although original in story-line. I just felt some of the methods in Bad Reputation were a little too old school, as if it wanted to answer back to the slasher films of the 80's. Nightmare on Elm Street parts 1 through infinity and Heather's, for example.But it does tend to reflect on current events in American schools. Kids these days get killed for less in school than what was portrayed here. But I finished this film with a sense of emptiness. I thought it was fair to give this a 4/10