The throwback film is fast becoming the bane of my existence.

You’ve heard too much already about my opinion of remakes. Hell, I’m getting sick of my venomous tirades against Dark Castle and other Hollywood production companies milking the corpses of long-gone visionaries in the name of the precious dollar. However, at least there’s the logic of name recognition driving their hands: if House of Wax was such a sleeper hit with Vincent Price in 1953, why it’ll be a smash with Paris Hilton in 2005! Of course, how many people know what a wax museum is these days, let alone having been in one...and come on, Paris Hilton???

Sorry, I’m slipping again. Anyhow, at least there’s name recognition driving the remake. The throwback or tribute film is simply using a handful of familiar thematic elements and winking references from cinematic days gone by in order to warm the black hearts of film dorks such as ourselves in order to draw in an audience, while still remaining original enough to draw in a new audience. Sometimes, these films can work very well. Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses (review here) soaked its Seventies grindhouse styling in a marinade of machine-gun edits, genuine suspense and delirious camera work. Cabin Fever (review here) at least offered a fairly original flesh-eating-virus plot that oozed in between all the referential bits. Unfortunately, Malevolence doesn’t fare so well: while its intriguing (albeit easily misconstrued as preachy) concept of nature-versus-nurture offers a few scant slivers of tasty meat, they are unfortunately sandwiched between countless thick, fluffy slices of white-bread cliché.

In 1989, six-year-old Martin Bristol was snatched from his backyard by a brutal serial killer. Over the next ten years, he was kept in a bag, only let out to watch his murderous abductor slaughter countless victims in the name of his "god" The Bull.

Flash forward to 1999: four desperate souls commit a daylight bank robbery (in ridiculous masks obviously purchased from a CVS clearance rack a week after Halloween, as what child worth his candy-snatching ability would say "Mommy, I want to be a green haired mummified zombie thing?"), with unfortunate results: one of the robbers, Max, takes a fatal bullet to the guts, while another is forced to take a mother and daughter hostage. Holing up in a supposedly abandoned house, their luck goes from bad to worse as they encounter a Jason-Voorhees-in-Friday-The-13th-Part-2-hooded maniac, who continues the ten-year stint of slaughtering his victims in the name of The Bull.

Unfortunately, Malevolence’s "spot the reference" game becomes tired and tedious. Why? Because instead of offering a compelling reason to continue its sly game, it simply makes the viewer want to watch the source material more and more. From its tepid kills (original or exceptionally gory deaths can often save a slasher), to plot holes that one could drive a city bus through, to the synth-heavy music, which ranges from amusingly Carpenter-esque to sounding like writer/producer/director/musician Stevan Mena is suffering a not-so-restful sleep on his Moog, it offers absolutely nothing new to a genre already oversaturated by unoriginal pap. It comes across more as derivative than "paying tribute," seeming less like an outright throwback and more a hapless me-too effort. Sure, it occasionally offers up a meager offering of coolness, such as in the eerie shrine to The Bull or how the knife-stabbing sound effects are sickening wet thuds, it simply doesn’t deliver the goods.

Interestingly enough, its cliché nature doesn’t only hold true for horror nerds. My girlfriend, who watched Malevolence with me (an act that could easily send me back to the singles scene), ended up predicting its scares and twists as easily as I did. Keep in mind, this is a girl who has never seen any of the Halloweens, only a few scant scraps of Friday The 13th and its sequels...simply put, when the nature of the film becomes predictable and hoary to someone who hasn’t been thoroughly exposed to its spiritual forebears, you know you’ve got a problem.

Even worse, its moderately intriguing ideas of corruption of youth and nature-versus-nurture is completely and utterly wasted. I admit, I felt a little squirmy before the opening credits, as the wide-eyed Martin watches the killer mercilessly hack up his victim: the corruption or abuse of children disturbs me quite thoroughly. Sadly, this eerie scene led to a predictable end that disappointed me. Instead of coming across as thought provoking and edgy, it seemed more like a Lifetime Original Movie. Replace Martin’s watching bloody killings with playing Grand Theft Auto or masturbating, and you could come to the same obvious conclusion of "Martin‘s gonna go bad," leaving doting mothers shaking their heads and clucking their tongues. Even if you’re too dull to pick up on the obvious message, Mena took it upon himself to put in not one, but two unnecessary epilogues on the end of his already overlong film. In one, the police find a journal which outlines exactly why the events transpired, so those of you who fell asleep during the movie’s scant 85 minutes (which felt like an eternity) can watch the screenwriter (again, Mena, I’m looking at you) not only attempt to explain simple, obvious character motivations, but scream about them while firing his guns wildly skyward, Texas style. Not content with already overstaying his welcome (or perhaps a desperate attempt to pad the film to feature-length), he tosses in a completely head-scratching ending that proves to be utterly pointless to both the film and the viewer.

Shot on 35mm and mastered in Anchor Bay’s trusty Divimax process, I will admit that Malevolence looks and sounds quite nice. Picture quality was very sharp, although occasionally grainy, with solid and accurate color representation. There were no digital artifacts I could see in the deep blacks or the bright whites. It certainly looks good, although such good picture quality seems unnecessary on a movie whose cinematic style is bone-dry. Audio is similarly impressive, with some great surround usage. At times, the dialogue was a little soft, and the volume was cranked up very high for some of the sound-effect based scares, possibly just to make sure the overdone closet-full-of-noisy-junk gag (what, they couldn’t get a cat to jump out?) makes us jump simply because we’re wondering if our receiver is broken. Extras are quite beefy, and include a feature-length commentary, deleted scenes (which are inexplicably mixed in with some thoroughly unfunny outtakes), a still gallery, trailers (including some pre-feature teasers for some AB releases that you should definitely buy over this in a heartbeat), the screenplay in DVD-ROM format, and a very long featurette entitled "Back To The Slaughterhouse" which shows Stevan Mena as a thoroughly enthusiastic filmmaker, and his cast and crew as agreeing with him on the sentiment. It’s too bad he apparently thinks too little of his audience’s intelligence to let some of the film’s mysteries remain just that: mysteries.