Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Stephan Hammond It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Payno I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

aesgaard41 Every once in a while a horror movie comes along with an interesting new spin or a brand new premise. The idea is to create something new rather than a rehash of any of the top ten to twelve horror movie archetypes out there. "Crazy Eights" has a good idea, but it doesn't really go anywhere with it. Part of the problem is the glaring holes in the plot and the confusing script. The movie starts out like "Without A Paddle" as six friends meet at the funeral of a classmate and are drawn into a scavenger hunt they takes them into a remake of "House On Haunted Hill." After a variety of strange encounters in their lives, the six are drawn to a barn where they left a time capsule as kids and find a skeleton in the trunk, which may or may not be linked to their pasts. They struggle too briefly with doing the right thing and way too quickly try to shrug it off if but to get very quickly lost on the local dirt roads and end up at an old deserted hospital in the ghost town of Entonsburg within an unidentified Southern state. This is where things start getting confusing. Instead of making efforts to get on their way, they explore the hospital and start getting picked off by an unseen killer in a dress. Thankfully, the gore is done off-camera with the disturbing images revealed only in brief flickering images. It's difficult to feel sympathetic to the characters unless you're a fan of the actors. The cast includes George Newbern, Traci Lords, Gabrielle Anwar and a number of actors with whom I'm unfamiliar. The movie never at any moment makes an effort to clear up or resolve any questions, instead pushing forward and killing off its cast like, as Jeff Goldblum once put it, the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride coming to life and killing the tourists. In fact, the movie can't choose if it's a haunted house movie or a slasher/gore movie. Somewhere in this detritus of scenes and images, the movie establishes the six friends once lived in the old hospital with their deceased friend and one other girl ("The Crazy Eight") where they were victims of psychological experiments, but they escaped after hiding the young girl and promising to return. (Remind you of "I Know What You Did Last Summer?") This suggests their dead friend is the one getting revenge for forgetting about her in the trunk all those years ago, but at no point does anyone realize, "Hey, this the old hospital where we were abandoned by our parents to be terrorized by those evil doctors?" How could they possibly block something like that out, and why does the girl's ghost look adult and zombified? Why do they stay in the building when all they were doing was trying to get directions? Why does the ghost kill them at all when she could just scare the crap out of them over and over and over? Like I said, the movie can't decide what it is. It's a promising premise that gets convoluted and confusing without being scary or even making sense, and in my world, that's just a crying waste of what could have been a decent haunted house movie.

lastliberal I got sucked into this by people who said it was scary and a good psychological thriller.I must have missed the scary parts because it just didn't have any. I heard screaming, but there wasn't anything there.The background music was very good and helped to set the tone, but nothing else delivered on that setting.None of the actors did any work to impress me. It seems as if they were just collecting a check for a weekend of work.I love the After dark films, but this is probably the worst one I have seen.

slayrrr666 "Crazy Eights" is a potentially good movie undermined by a lot of flaws.**SPOILERS**Following a friend's death, friends Jennifer Jones, (Dina Mayer) Father Lyle Dey, (George Newbern) Gina Conte, (Traci Lords) Beth Patterson, (Gabrielle Anwar) Brent Sykes, (Franky Whaley) and Wayne Morrison, (Dan DeLuca) who have known each other since childhood, gather together to go through the belongings left to them. Despite being initially apprehensive, they go out to an isolated cabin where everything is located and set about looking through the valuables, eventually discovering a strange facility located within. Trying to understand how everything fits together, they realize that all of them were involved in a top-secret project that had experimented on children, including them, and that someone is still there trying to get revenge on them, forcing them to race to find it's secret and stop it.The Good News: There wasn't a whole lot to like with this one. The fact that it starts off with a potentially-promising premise that sounds pretty cool and should-be fun to occur. It's quite unique, about the experimentations going on and it does have a ring of plausibility about it, one of those areas that could've happened in the past and really could've been done, making it all that much better. The fact that the locations on display, when we can see them, are pretty creepy is a plus. The giant bunker underground looks really creepy when we get to see it, being large, spacious and, in one of the highlight moments where we follow one of them who goes in circles trying to get out only to arrive back at the same spot, is inspired and ingenious, full of great shots and really makes for one of the creepiest times in the film. Another minor one, where the professor has the flickering images pop-up on the video-screen after the classroom lecture is really nice, considering it's unknown what's happening then and it doesn't take an eternity to get through like the others shortly after. The last good plus here is the fact that there's some nice deaths in here, when it gets around to knocking them off. One is impaled through the neck with a spear-on-the-wall, another is stabbed with a glass shard, one has their leg broken in a fall down stairs, one has a windowsill closed on their neck and another rips their eyes out, so this one has some gore. Otherwise, it's all that's good here.The Bad News: This one here can only be called a major disappointment, as there isn't too much good stuff here. One of the many problems is that there's hardly any real interest going on at the beginning of the film concerning what's going on. Despite the fact that they meet together to discuss the funeral, yet it's just so dull and lifeless that it hardly gets anything going. From an abundance of failed scares, such as whatever was happening to the sculptor as that scene lasted an eternity while she kept smoothing out a piece muttering to herself yet not once was there a clear revelation of what she was making or why that was a scary situation to be in, or the haunting of the priest in the rectory as he spent another eternity searching for something making noise off the distance, yet because of the way it's edited, it appears that he's looking for the source of the music playing over the scene. That the film then proceeds to spend close to ten minutes with them all talking to each other about the significance of it, with no resolution only to suddenly throw out an idea that no one made a trail to so that it seemed logical, and then even more wandering around in an area so dark it renders the hopeful-suspense moot before finally finding the underground bunker that leads to even more time wandering around. Half of the movie is literally devoted to wandering around the different locations spouting off the same thing about trying to find out why they're there and what it all means. This makes it incredibly difficult to get into the film and take anything about it in any way, shape or form seriously, meaning the whole thing is just deadly dull. Another big flaw here is the film's lack of explanation for what exactly happened at the bunker in the finale. The film just had a bunch of actions carried out, including some gruesome deaths, then just ended without really saying what happened. It makes no clues as to whether it was a ghost, one of them, or what, and the stopping suddenly without explanations tactic isn't comforting. The last flaw to this one is that, because of the amount of time spent elsewhere, most of the big revelations concerning the story occur at the very end. The reason for naming the group as such, what happened to them to get to know each other, what was happening to them, left unexplained until the last half-hour of the film, rendering them of their importance and making it seem as though the film had forgotten about them. It's not a good feeling to have, and these here are what's wrong with the film.The Final Verdict: This wasn't all-out bad, as there's a nice amount of potential on display, but fails mainly into the disappointment area. Really only seek this one out if you're a fan of the cast or feel the need to complete the series, otherwise those who know this isn't something for them are advised to ignore.Rated R: Graphic Language and Violence

bobwildhorror Being named to the After Dark Horrorfest must be a mixed bag. On the one hand, your independent horror flick gets great distribution and promotion. On the other, it gets saddled with unrealistic expectations, the result of the festival's hype about releasing films that are too scary and subversive for Hollywood. I've yet to see one of these films that lived up to these inflated expectations. Most are just variations on a theme, with CRAZY EIGHTS proving no exception.This picture offers us a combination of THE BIG CHILL and CUBE (or any number of Twilight Zone episodes about people being stuck in strange environments). A group of childhood friends regroup after the death of one of their own and find themselves stuck in the basement of an abandoned research hospital. Of course, they share a horrific secret: they were all test subjects in a psychological experiment that went awry. They hallucinate. They scream and cry. And then they run off by themselves, character after character, so they can be conveniently picked off by an evil entity.CRAZY EIGHTS is competently directed. It features a great location (who can fault an abandoned, creepy hospital?). And the actors, including former porn star Tracy Lords, do a nice job.But I was again struck by what the film didn't have: any kind of plausible explanation about the spirit infestation. Instead, we get lame J-horror borrowings. *BIG SPOILER* All this carnage was due to the spirit of one angry little girl. It's an angry little girl we hardly ever glimpse, which is a good thing in a film like this, but it's still a lame excuse for 90 minutes of supposed "terror." It's as nonsensical as its big-budget cousin, SILENT HILL, which used the same premise.Don't get me wrong, this isn't a horrible movie. But neither is it a thinking person's horror film. I'm actually confused by who its target audience was. There's so little blood that it isn't pandering to gorehounds. CRAZY EIGHTS actually goes out of its way to hide the aftermath of the ghost attacks. And even if it did want to linger on the carnage, the effect would have been nullified by the muted color palette of the film. The entire picture looks like it was de-saturated. It's an odd and pointless approach…a perfect compliment to the plot.