DVD Review: Greetings
Greetings (2007)
Studio: 8 Range Road.
Release Date: September 8, 2009
Directed By: Kenneth Colley, Kirsty Cox, Mel Stephenson, Ben Shockley & Henry Dunn.
Cast: Kenneth Colley.
Review By: Annie Riordan
Have you ever been subjected to the horror of watching someone else’s home movies? Pasting a polite, zombified smile on your face while the epic of Junior’s 4th birthday party unfolds, or Swing Night at Gramma’s Retirement Center reaches a Kool-Aid fueled crescendo? Well, I’m sorry to have to report that both of the aforementioned options are vastly preferable to watching Greetings, a 72 minute long snoozer that makes little Jeremy’s Bar Mitzvah look like a Crank movie by comparison.
It’s Cathy’s birthday, hip hip hoorah, and several friends have gathered at she and her boyfriend’s flat for a dull night of sitting around, drinking wine ,and eating stale birthday cake. For the first half hour of film time, we must make do with small talk. And when you consider the fact that this movie is only one hour20and ten minutes long, a half an hour is a long time to wait for the story to get underway.
Turns out that Cathy and her boyfriend (whose name I forget, and I don’t care enough to go and look it up) have recently purchased an antique table which doubles as a Ouija board. With nothing else to do, the guys turn a wineglass upside down and start playing with it. Nothing happens – at first! – but as the party wears on (and on and on and on) strange things begin to happen. Someone keeps writing things on the steamy bathroom mirror. Cold spots develop. And still, the dull party keeps limping onward. Eventually, Cathy, her boyfriend, and their two besties decide to call it a night and crash. Nothing happens for a very. Long. Time. Then, one of the guys gets up to get a drink of water! And…nothing happens! We get to watch him stare off into space as he gulps down his glass! Oh, the spine-chilling suspense! WILL he raid the fridge next? WILL he take a piss? The possibilities are endless!
Finally, stuff does start to happen but it’s too little too late. Apparently, the Ouija board conjured up a demon who is all-powerful and totally evil, but can be easily defeated with a coupla squirts from a bottle of bathroom air freshener. Oh, and Cathy’s period also ties into it somehow, and the many useful uses of menstrual blood as a demon-deterring weapon is just something I never needed to see.
There are plenty of other low-budget,, semi-crappy films about Ouija boards you can watch, such as The Devil’s Curse and Amityville 3. I’d even recommend 1986′s Witchboard, starring hair metal mascot Tawny Kitaen, before I’d recommend this shoddy piece of dreck. Greetings is so poorly acted, so badly written and so mercilessly boring, that I can honestly only recommend it to hardcore menstrual blood fetishists. Everyone else would be better off staring at a used tampon for an hour.
Brutal As Hell Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
