Review of Very Bad Things (1998) by James S — 19 Jul 2009

What starts out like the US answer to Shallow Grave as Christian Slater, Jon Favreau, Daniel Stern and the other two who you kinda recognise head to Las Vegas for a bachelor party of drugs ands accidental hooker slaughter, unfortunately turns into a foul tasting, overlong and not very well planned mess.

This is black comedy for those who detest their comedy with milk.....it's pretty dark stuff. There are a couple of great performances. Christian Slater does the psycho thing that he did so well in Heathers and Cameron Diaz is clearly having the time of her life as the psychopathic bride and it's partly down to these two that the film is not an utter disaster.

Once the stripper is buried in the Nevada desert though there's just a bit too much shouting and realism takes a rocket out of the film. The plot decides to go down the normal psycho killer route with only one or two twists being thrown in and ultimately we start to lose sympathy with even the allegedly good characters of the piece as the humour begins to dry up too.

The ending is utterly abysmal and feels like a total cop out and just another way to try and lower the taste bar even further. It's as though it should belong to another film. The film as whole feels a lot like that at times and seems like a badly put together puzzle of lots of ideas that have been thrown around by a bunch of guys drinking and playing poker.

Diaz and Slater can't even manage to salvage this in it's second half and you are left thinking that given the premise you could probably go away and rewrite this and make it a whole lot better.