Devil's Racecourse (2009)

Thanks for the memories!

One of my all time favorites.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I stuck around just long enough for, as one reviewer put it "the totally gratuitous sleazy sex scene", or as I call it- the best part of the movie. Thanks for the heads up fellow reviewer or I probably wouldn't have made it that far.

OMG. This utter disaster left me breathless and amazed at the sheer magnitude of its incompetent awfulness. The acting is occasionally passable (star Anderson and co-star Gailes in particular do their level best considering the craptastic dialog which burdens them) and there are some moments of occasional near-cinematography. But wow... there is barely an attempt at stitching together a coherent narrative, even at the editing and basic continuity level (for example, scenes that track a particular character's movements, but which were clearly filmed on totally different days ---one cloudy and one sunny--- are simply slapped together as if nobody would notice). Oh, but there's so much more: Much of the second act features a female character running through the woods wearing only a bra as a top, eluding some unknown bad guy... scene after scene after scene, we cut back to this girl, in her bra, running through the woods, eluding Unknown Dude; meanwhile, other characters who are ostensibly concerned about her whereabouts (and whom we ostensibly would care about if they weren't so obnoxious or boring) amble around or loiter about, having rambling conversations about... oh, y'know... stuff. Oh, and two of the characters are lesbians, because... well, just because. None of what we learn about any of these people has any real significance to the plot.A hot blonde with large breasts (which have been mostly exposed during every scene she's been in) gets dispatched violently once she's finally stripped completely for a totally gratuitous, sleazy and pointless sex scene.A promising fight scene involving Ms. Gailes and Mr. Tahoe quickly becomes a mess of choppy cuts, strongly hinting at desperate attempts to mask the absence of any legitimate fight choreography. The big reveal ---if you can call it that--- is delivered via cryptic dialog from a character who is YELLING HOARSELY at the character he just shot repeatedly. We learn virtually nothing about the dreadful conspiracy that justifies all of this silliness, except that the government did something treacherous to someone for some reason, and 9/11 was the excuse.What happened? Why did it happen? What was the point? Why did a by-the-numbers "kids get picked off one by one while camping in the woods" slasher B-movie get hijacked by an obtuse conspiracy thriller? Nope. Nobody knows, and really... nobody cares. It's mind-blowing that this thing even exists.

The most positive thing I can say about this film is that its relatively short duration wastes less of your time than a longer firm would. You might think a short film would have to be about its business and get to its point but, in this case, there really appears to be no point -- the plot is left unfinished. There are a bunch of bad guys but we are never really told what their motivation is. They are hiding some sort of secrets but we aren't really told what those secrets are. It is perhaps a stretch to say there are loads of plot holes because that would assume there is a some sort of cohesive plot which there really isn't.Perhaps to add to the appeal to young males, there is an embarrassingly buxom woman cast whose contribution to the film is made crystal clear about 1/2 way through when she engages in a totally gratuitous sex scene that has no real connection to the storyline whatsoever.The characters are actually somewhat interesting but their development is so weak one is again left with more questions than answers.So, you end up with 76 minutes of undeveloped conspiracy theories, a bit of porn and some violence thrown in.