You know, boys and girls, we have a lot of fun here at Monsters at Play. This site mainly serves as a source of entertainment for our staff. We often like to invent comedic send-ups of movies, both good and not-so-good (like the Soft for Digging theme song). Why, just prior to today's screening of A Chronicle of Corpses, the Head Vampire and I joked that it would be quite corking if this film turned out to be a rag-tag group of corpses who work at a daily newspaper called The Chronicle. What a sight that would be, we thought! Well, after slogging through this unbearable wreck of a movie, I can state with impunity that our vision of the movie would have been a thousand-fold more entertaining than what we witnessed.

Boys and girls, we've got our first Festival Flop.

Perhaps my afternoon viewing of A Chronicle of Corpses was doomed from the onset. After last night's grueling double-feature (Suicide Club and Trouble Every Day), I was definitely in the mood for some lighter fare. By the end of the day I could barely contain my laughter, which is not the type of reaction you want from a dead-serious medieval gothic horror story. I didn't even stick around for the Q&A with the director, for fear I'd ask an incriminating question like "why does your movie suck so much donkey dick?" To put it bluntly: this movie sucks. It sucks long, and it sucks hard.

Why does A Chronicle of Corpses suck so badly? Allow me to count the ways. First, a couple of characters are killed; we don't care how or why. Then we witness the family priest giving communion to every single fucking character in the film, in a scene that drags on about 10 minutes too long. Never mind that we don't know who these characters are yet, as they are introduced later when they're killed. Next, we witness a Sinead O'Connor look-alike walking around undetected, killing off the family one member at a time, which serves no purpose other than to make the family even more indifferent and uninteresting.

Then, in what has to be a cinematic first, the family sends out an all-homosexual hunting party to catch the killer. It all goes horribly wrong when some ducks start quacking and the men are killed off in some intermittent fog. Hilarity! Towards the end, which can't come soon enough, the priest (played by Bronson Pinchot from the TV show Perfect Strangers) inexplicably kills the last remaining servant girl by slicing her neck with a toothbrush. The funny thing is, we want her to die. We want everyone to fucking die so we can get the fuck out of the theatre and forget this whole fucking ordeal.

Allow me to continue, dear reader. A Chronicle of Corpses follows one of the sacred rules of cartoons: every character wears only one outfit the entire time. So each member of this rich and noble family has only one stinking outfit? It only makes sense that the servant girls wear the same ill-fitting bed sheets through the whole movie, but why are these rich people doomed to wear the same damn clothes, day after day? Because they're flat broke, a fact which isn't divulged until the very end, in which the grandmother goes nuts on a shroom-fueled confessional that comes long after the audience has given up caring.

And it gets better! A personal pet peeve of mine is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie; it's just plain stupid. Sure enough, the annoying fat-faced servant girl laments that "we'll be nothing more than A Chronicle of Corpses". I'm surprised she didn't just turn towards the camera and wink. For this, director Andrew Repasky McElhinney wins the first ever Monsters at Play Golden Douchebag Award. Good job there, douchebag! By the half-way point of the film, I sincerely wanted to be doing anything other being trapped in the theatre with that awful, awful movie. Like going back to work. Seriously. Having my head shoved into a vice and squeezed flat is a much more appealing prospect.

To cut this tirade short, this movie is terrible. The movie has an empty, dull lifeless look to it, which is actually perfect for the film because nothing happens, ever. The acting is blasé at best, and snore-inducing at worst. I'm embarrassed to say that the cast are all Philadelphia locals; I shall now hang my head in shame. This movie was named one of the Top Ten Films of 2001 by The New York Times and The Village Voice, a fact which absolutely blows my mind. I'd like to know what type of drugs made this film enjoyable for those folks, 'cuz I want some of that shit. Don't believe the hype, this movie DOES NOT deliver the goods.

Two Thumbs Down. Way Down. All the way down to hell. You stole 83 of the longest minutes of my life, Andrew Repasky McElhinney, and I want them back.