The nameless woman then saunters towards the porch, silicone-inflated breasts not moving a millimeter as she waits for her lover (at this point quickly doffing his shirt) to give chase.

I confusedly examine the DVD case, making sure I have indeed been sent a horror film. The music, the acting, the half-assed poker game setup, they all reek of the worst kind of porno. I can only imagine a morbidly obese, Hawaiian shirt and gold chain clad director sitting, ham-hock thighs splayed, running sausage fingers across a sweaty moustache...

Thankfully, our starlet breaks the wicked spell by gasping in terror at a masked man standing on the front lawn, whom the boyfriend promptly threatens (after all, the neighborly thing to do is let people know you have a gun...wait...) Not happy with the answer, our masked man (who looks like the love child of a dried apple doll and Emmett Brown), pulls out a knife barely suitable for peeling an orange and stomps towards our ever-so-manly male lead. Being a man's man, he decides to beat cheeks back inside and turn out the lights to foil the killer...yes, ladies and gentlemen, turn out the lights and hide in a side bedroom. Being stalked by a threatening man in a mask wielding a knife? Make sure you turn out the lights and hide right after he's already seen you! It's certain to throw a monkey wrench into his murderous machinations!

Unfortunately, the theory is proven wrong when the killer proves to be smarter than, say, a pigeon, and finds our loving couple stuck against the tip of his knife. Damn.

Flash forward two years later. A sporty SUV sputters to a stop on a back road, vomiting out its contents: a quintet of obnoxious, bitchy women. Desperate for help, they flag down a conveniently passing car (who just happens to be going to the middle of nowhere as well) by, I kid you not, acting like middle school cheerleaders. They jump around, hoot and holler, and even pretend to flash a little leg. Out hops their knight in shining armor, a man dragging along the worst British accent in the history of film. After an exchange of awkward flirtation and even more awkward innuendo ("You can pop my hood!"), our limey loser fixes the girls' SUV and sends them on their merry way. Suddenly, the car drives over the edge of the cliff and explodes, killing all five women inside. The End.

God, I wish. No, they make it to the cabin, which every girl seems to complain about as if it were the Clampetts' outhouse. Seriously, it ain't that bad, girls. It's not as if people were murdered in here or anything...wait... After some bitchy exchanges about pregnancies and man-stealing (where's Maury Povich when you need him?), the girls are visited by a redneck in a Free Tibet (?!) shirt, who offers them gift baskets and "tantric may-ssages." Not already creepy enough, he pushes himself way over the edge by asking the girls for some ibuprofen, as one of them has to be on their "monthly," because he can smell their period. SMELL THEIR PERIOD!

At this point, my face actually began to ache from the grimace that bit of dialogue had brought out on it. As anyone who knows me can attest, I say some pretty insensitive crap to people, but I would never talk about being able to smell a woman's period for Christ's sakes! Narrowly escaping a quintuple-strength ball-kneeing, our hero stumbles away, leaving behind him a roar of laughter.

Sensing the viewer's boredom, the movie decides to start thinning the pack by luring one of the girls outside to, I shit you not, get a tampon. At this point, I wonder if screenwriters Nicholas J. Hagen and Chris Hogan have ever talked to women, or if they have delusions of the fairer sex being nothing more than menstruating sacks of catfighting fury.

After a long night of Cosmo-reading, leg-shaving and feminine hygiene (okay, not really), our now-quartet discovers one of their members missing, replaced only by a mysterious videotape, which shows them walking into the cabin and other creepy, stalkerish moments, culminating in a shot of their friend (the only non-white girl, I might add) being attacked in mid-tampon-retrieval. Not wanting to be horribly murdered, they all drink tall glasses of Jonestown Kool-Aid and drop dead. The End.

Dare to dream. No, this movie continues along, dropping characters at the feet of our plucky killer, who finally drags Sara (the only one whose name I care to remember, interestingly enough) back to his lair, which is wallpapered in scads of Hefty bags. Will she survive the killer and his hick partner? Will she escape this living hell? Will we?

As I've explained countless times before, I adore a well-done indie film. Simply adore them. After all, the world is loaded with talented people, their brains stuffed with original ideas just waiting to be let free onto video or, if they're lucky, a few reels of cheap film stock. However, many independent filmmakers seem content with pushing out unoriginal drivel that even the notoriously plagiaristic Hollywood would scoff at. If you have free reign over subject matter, why would you be content simply releasing another hackneyed slasher flick? Cold Fear has two distinct flavors going on: the been-there-done-that feel of its base narrative, and the outright amateurishness of the production itself.

To be fair, the production really isn't that awful. It seems as if Nicholas J. Hagen has a pretty good eye for lighting and composition, as the movie itself looks pretty polished at times...then the actors had to open their mouths and gum up the works. At times, I wonder if the movie was actually scripted or not, as the dialogue was painfully choppy (see pornoriffic example above), lending more of a feel that Hagen simply told his cast their emotions and a basic skeleton of events and to just run with it.

Which really is disappointing because, like I said before, the movie does look pretty polished. Hagen occasionally wowed me with a few smart cuts and one solid scare, and the movie itself looked quite good, with picture quality that certainly held up better than similar genre efforts like Short Cut Road (review here). Hagen spent the money on good film stock, and it shows. Audio is nice and clear, with every syllable of the painful dialogue ringing through clean and easy. Extras are slim, and limited to a photo gallery and a running commentary, which I didn't listen to as it required watching this movie again. I ain't that much of a masochist.