Totem
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Totem holds a special place with me as it, along with Jigsaw, was one of the first Full Moon movies I ever watched. So, I may be a little easier on this movie than most other reviews have been..or as I should be for that matter.You’re going to have to cut me some slack here as the first time I saw this was back in 2003ish and I watched it again about two weeks ago. If you’ve read some of my other reviews, then you know that my short term (and long term for that matter) memory isn’t the hottest so I may mix up the order of some shit. You’ll get the general idea though.
Totem follows the long-standing low budget horror movie tactic of keeping everything contained to one or two locations/sets and in this case it works pretty well with the script and action. Basically, 6 Full Moon stereotype young folks are mysteriously drop what they are doing and summoned to go to a cabin somewhere in the middle of east boo-foo. You’ve got your standard good guy, jocky type, high school girl, bitchy girl, smart girl and mysterious fellow who is supposed to be American Indian but looks more …. definitely not Native American.
Obviously, they have all tried to jet from this shit shack but have had no luck as it seems to be surrounded by some magic force field. Our last lady to arrive decides that she’s busting up out of there and begins taking off down a hill and in to the woods. She makes it further than any of the others, so naturally they all follow her. They end up in a cemetary of sorts with its centerpiece being a pretty cool looking totem pole. None of them have any idea what its for other than that it looks old. Of course everyone also looks to their “native american” friend who has no idea what it is…probably because he’s not native american. Whatever.
Business starts to pick up when the one of the girls goes to take a teedle in the outhouse but doesn’t come back for quite a while. Our good guy goes out to find her and soon comes back “covered” (ie slightly spattered) in blood holding the girl, who is clearly deceased. To liven things up a little bit, homeboy has no idea what happened – just that she is dead. Awesome. Time passes (ie – padding) and the girl comes back to life all zombie-like mumbling some shit and everyone is confused and frightened. The clear answer here is to not just toss her zombie corpse outside, but to chain her down to the table they had placed her on and see what shakes out. Pure genius.
Eventually they find a book that contains some information on what’s going on and essentially they are stuck in a spell-driven mystical universe where there are to be 3 executioners and 3 victims. Once the cycle is complete the Totem can come back to life and I dunno.. take over the world or something with its neverending evil.
Once others start biting it, the 3 Totem “monsters” (read: puppets) start showing up and things remain kind of boring. I would also like to note that the first Totem who shows up plops down out of the sky on to the cabin’s floor and you can clearly see the puppet rods. It’s like they weren’t even trying – at all. For a lot of folks, this is a major turn off..for me it’s typical Full Moon at its finest and I personally took it with a grain of salt.
If you want to find out what happens from there then you’ll have to buy or rent the movie, silly. I’m not giving this shit away for free and I’m sure FM can use the bucks from your DVD purchase or rental.
Alright, so I didn’t go easy on this, but in reality it was still a really fun movie for me to watch. A lot of folks say its extremely boring and while I can see how it would appear that way, it still held my interest and I have a pretty short attention span so I guess that counts for something.
I do have one gripe, the DVD for this is terrible. I popped it in the ol’ Sony and up comes a terrible hot-pink screen with two options – “trailer” and “play movie”. They definitely could have put a *lot* more effort in to this but hey..shit happens sometimes and we don’t always get what we want.
All in all, Totem was a good time and I give it the nod.
*** out of 5.
