3 out of 5

Directed by: Daniel Liatowitsch and David Todd Ocvirk

Gelled spiky hair; a manic pixie type girl wearing JNCO jeans; mentions of Prozac being proliferate; a casually transphobic joke… it’s 1999, y’all, and Kolobos is 1999 as hard as it can be, kicking off with interviews of candidates for a filmed project where the selections will be living in a camera-covered house with one another – shades of Real World and the then forthcoming-in-the-US Big Brother; the documentary style definitely touching on Blair Witch, its craze kicked off just a couple months prior to Kolobos’ release – and alternating with first person shots of someone all bandaged up in a hospital, whispers of the massive scarring on her face.

The stereotypical roles each of the chosen participants slots into (the sex-hungry bro; aforementioned pixie girl; the shy girl; an actress; the literate poet) informs some similarly very stereotypical dialogue, motivated by nothing but those stereotypes; the stiffness of these performances doesn’t better the delivery of the dialogue; and the faux-arty style of the improv sounding music and woozy camerawork doesn’t mix with it either. Kolobos is low budget, and the creators just aren’t massaging that – its vision exceeding grasp and, possibly, skill, meaning it’s a low budget flick that looks cheap and feels cheap, where best intentions only enhance that. And as this in-movie film project takes its horror turn – shutters drop and lock into place, barring all into the house, and a mix of traps and an unseen killer starts picking everyone off – the writing’s tendency towards cliche gets worse, as there’s not exactly logic to everyone’s reactions, rather just compositing how people normally react in horror films of similar types and copying and pasting that all together.

None of this changes during the movie’s 90 minutes.

So… is that rating a cheeseball thing? Kolobos is so cringey it’s good? The movie can be pretty cringey, but some interesting details start to pop in: the cross-editing of the – as we now understand – survivor of the house in the hospital and the flashbacks continue, but the artsy stuff is dialed down, and the way this character’s (played by Amy Weber) background is built shows some care; the actress brings out some VHS tapes for the group to watch, and it turns out she’s the star of a fictional slasher series. This kind of genre nodding was never knew in horror, but the kind of nods the movie does are an interesting hodge podge, not just a strict Halloween reference or something. And then what really grabbed my attentions: the first kill is… grisly. In a way that feels discordant with the flick’s stumbling vibe – in a good way – and also very odd for 1999. It’s still cheaply done, but effective.

From hereon out, reach is still way beyond grasp, and character motivations / logic are all nil, but the movie continues to rack up these small, interesting ones, whether via just strange ideas, or inventive shots, or how it keeps building a rather disturbingly creepy sense of lore behind its antagonist. The $500,000 budget likely went into some makeup effects, and, yeah, you’re not grossed out, but it’s still pretty conceptually weird and/or unnerving stuff.

And the ending. The wikipedia description is much more literal than I was taking it, but that doubly mentioned reach/grasp – it feels like it lines up in those final shots, suggesting a second, more patient pass of the preceding story (and perhaps stronger direction / performances) could’ve brought the film along. As is, I’m not telling you it’s a good movie, but it’s not a bad one, and has surprising oomph underneath its surface flaws.