6 Plots (2012)

6 Plots
Directed by: Leigh Sheehan
Written by: Tim C Patterson
Starring: Alice Darling, Eliza Taylor, Emily Wheaton, Joey Coley-Sowry, Penelope Mitchell, Ryan Corr

6 Plots (2012)

(15) Running time: 86 minutes

Director: Leigh Sheenan

Writer: Tim C. Patterson

Cast: Alice Darling, Ryan Corr, Penelope Mitchell, Joey Coley-Sowry, Emily Wheaton, Eliza Taylor

Reviewed by: Matt Wavish

I seem to be having a real bad run of horror films at the moment, and it has been well over a month since I saw one that was actually any good. In fact, Rob Zombie’s Lords of Salem at the end of April just might have been the last horror film I actually enjoyed. However, I know there is some good stuff on the horizon, and I am continuously optimistic that soon I will find one of those straight to DVD gems that demand to be seen by everyone, so I keep going. I didn’t have high hopes for 6 Plots, and for good reason: it is another to add to my list of forgetful rubbish that I wish I hadn’t wasted my time with. Yet another thorn in the side of my beloved genre of horror.

6 Plots is another one of those Saw and Hostel rip-offs that tries to be clever by using modern technology (it is force fed to the viewer in painful fashion), but fails on just about every level. The trapped in a chamber, race against time to save your friends, internet torture porn game has been done over and over, and ideas are fast running out. Films like 6 Plots also proves that we know this genre far too well to actually feel any sense of danger, and thus films like this fall flat on their face with little or no idea how to actually stand out from the crowd.

This boring Australian ‘horror’ see’s seven friends get together for that ultimate party where beer, drugs and pizza will flow freely. We meet the friends and to be fair they are all fairly likeable, and you don’t really want to see bad things happen to them, but you know they eventually will and the film puts them directly in harm’s way very quickly. Waking up after the party, one of the friends is now all alone in the house where it all began, and believes her friends are playing a prank. However, a quick call from a nasty person calling itself The Emoticon (it appears on your phone as an evil face you see, clever that!) proves that the girls friends are in a lot of trouble. They have all been buried in boxes in six unknown locations, and are awaiting their fate, and a race against time follows to find them, and save them before they are killed. Oh, but to make things interesting there can be no police or parents called, but they are called anyway.

Each character locked in their ‘torture chamber’ has a different fate ahead of them. One is covered in petrol, another ends up churned into pieces by a large saw machine, another ends up in a dustbin truck. It is all imaginative stuff (!!) and we are with the victims for every  scream and daft piece of dialogue. Hell, their so-called school friends can even watch the events on the Internet without raising an eyebrow at the fact their friends could actually be in trouble. Zero tension is created, and a thin plot does not help drive the film at all, and a terrible soundtrack delivers one of those sleep inducing atmospheres rather than tense. The lead girl does her best to look scared, while parents over do the ‘concerned’ parent thing, but nothing really gives the viewer any sense of real danger. The villain is an overused idea and not very scary at all, and his final shot right at the end is laughable.

6 Plots has very little going for it to recommend. Granted some of the deaths are quite cool, and even though have been seen many times before, they are a pleasant escape from the poor quality of everything else. There are one or two moments where the tension does leak through, and the cast clearly have tried their best, but this films suffers from a ‘been there, done that’ kind of feeling, and sadly it has been done, many times before and a hundred times better.

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