Customer Reviews

13 Seconds

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

While watching 13 SECONDS, it felt more like thirteen hours; the movie is pretty dull. It's one of those indie faves where writer/director/star Jeff Thomas tries esoteric camera angles with atrocious lighting to try and create an atmosphere of terror. The acting is so terrible and the script so contrived and confusing, the movie just sits there like a ripe avocado and does nothing. The characters are so cardboard, I couldn't keep up with their names or just how they interacted. Really a bomb, avoid.

If I could meet the actors and director, screenwriters, person who decided to market this peice of crap in real life I would slap them and ask for my 7$ back. DO NOT BUY this. I wont even use the DVD as a coaster. It's going down as the all time worst movie I have ever seen, and I didnt even see 20 minutes of it.

If you bought a gun from walmart loaded it up and pointed it at five random strangers and said "make a movie NOW or ill kill you!!!' then this would probably be it. A movie made by people with no talent and no desire to make it. You cant tell me these people actually cared about the product they were making. The AOL voice you hear when you sign out "goodbye" from the internet has 10 times more personality than anyof these guys. I mean not everyone is going to be the next robert deniro, but it doesnt take a lot of effort to atleast display some emotion. The only explanation i could think of was that they went the toxic avenger route and intentionally made the movie bad. But it wasnt filmed like a campy horror comedy, it was filmed like it was a serious film but right before the movie began shooting, someone killed off all of their families and they had no desire to live anymore. But i cant say all negative things about this movie. this movie gives hope to everyone who watches it. how you ask, cause if these guys got this movie made, then so can everyone else. so if you get fired from your job or something, and you have nothing left to live for, just grab a camera phone and start filming away, it can't get much worse than this.

I just thought of something. what if this movie was so well made and that the people who made this movie were so brilliant that it just seems to suck to us because our feeble minds are not capable of comprehending the awesomeness of this film?

There was maybe 13 seconds of this movie that was worth watching... that's a BIG maybe.

The other 92 minutes were excruciatingly painful and boring.

What is this new trend of making bad versions of An Occurrence at Owl Creek? Did everyone see Jacob's Ladder when they were like five years old and decide to try and remake it? That's what 13 Seconds feels like, a poor man's combination of Jacob's Ladder, Angel Heart and some horrible Mexican soap opera on Telemundo. The video quality looks like it was shot on dad's old VHS recorder from 1985.

Giving this movie one star is a GIFT.

Oh, horrid film, where did you go wrong? I hope I have enough fingers to count the ways. There is a point during filmmaking when a director or producer can simply say "Stop". There is no harm in that, nor is there any shame. This should have been one of those films that somebody, anybody, should have said, "we need to stop now". From the uninteresting characters, to the lackluster story, to the very poor production, the lines between avant-garde horror cinema and cheaply made movies became hazy.

There are three ways to completely destroy the power of a film without touching the story and those are through sound, sight, and mind. If a movie sounds great, you have captured some of your audience. If it looks good as well, you have captured even more and finally, if you can keep them mentally involved than you, as a director, should have most to all of the audience in your hands. Sadly, 13 Seconds did none of the above. The sound was horrendous. Synchronizing your actor's voices to match what they were saying when filming and the emotions they were feeling is not hard. Apparently, director Jeff Thomas decided robots could make this English spoken poorly dubbed in English feature. There was no emotion behind anyone talking, even our main character Davis. I found myself laughing whenever anyone opened their mouth. I couldn't tell if anyone was actually interested in what was happening, or if the amount of beer drinking that occurred before the dubbing was finally taking effect. Second, the sight of this film was just as bad as the voices. No apparent acting classes were needed from any of the actors or from the demons. There needs to be some level of class with the both the actors and demons, but in this film there were not. Davis, Jeff Thomas, was trying hard to be exactly like Bruce Campbell, which only lowered this film further into the pit of disgust. Everyone else seemed like they were going through the actions that were given to them that minute and trying to remember what exactly they were doing. There were no genuine moments in this film visually, just non-actors remembering to be robots. Finally, the mental involvement is key. I am not talking about just story here, because you can have a bad story but still keep people guessing for more. I am talking about just the apparent want to see what happens. Does your audience want to see what is going to happen next? In this film, my answer would be "no". The ending does provide a moment of shock, but you need to force your way through an hour and a half of sludge just to see it ... and it really isn't that grandiose.

With these three elements lacking considerably, you may be thinking what is the value of this film? I was amazed to see that it had won some awards in the horror circuit because, to me, it showed the poorest of the poor. While I would agree, that the ending (without giving it away) was creative and inventive, what filmmakers need to realize that you need to have a complete film to blow us away. Do not just pride yourself on the ending because you are going to have upset people like myself that could tell that you spent more on that then you did the rest of the film. I have heard other critics say that this is like a low-budget The Sixth Sense, but for me it was not even in the same ballpark. Half the fun of The Sixth Sense was the action leading up to the surprising ending (which wasn't even that shocking), and that is where 13 Seconds suffers. Thomas' film has nothing to offer in the middle except for a very muddled story in which you nearly need a PhD in pagan culture to fully understand. I think I would have been more impressed by the ending of this film if there was a meaty center instead of all that gristle and grime.

Was this the worst film I have seen this year? After a day of thinking about it I can say "no", but would I be truthful to myself? There were some interesting scenes, which did showcase some of Thomas' potential, but the blatant disrespect for everything else just hurt those good points. I had trouble coping with the voices and the constant clichés that Thomas tried to repetitively use. There just seemed to be too much running into rooms and shadows lurking in the darkness instead of character development and understanding. I needed to know who these people were and a better explanation of the immediate story. Thomas seemed and felt unfocused in this film giving us not enough in one area, while completely destroying another. Inconsistency is what hurt this film, but what destroyed it for me were the small bits that could have easily been changed to construct a decent film. I wasn't happy, and I don't think many will be with the final results that 13 Seconds has to offer.

Grade: ** out of *****

My first thought as I began watching this was: MST3K--this film is unintentionally funny. Our whole family laughed ourselves hoarse, especially any time anyone opened his or her mouth. We enjoyed the redheaded girl especially. The only annoyance was that at the end of the movie, it abruptly turned into a Chick tract--well, annoying for me, anyway. I was watching what I supposed was a horror film, albeit a ridiculous one, and got blindsided by a turn or burn sermon, and I found that a bit deceitful. But then, I got annoyed when Stargate transformed mid-movie from what I supposed was an intelligent sci-fi film into a glorified Star Wars rip-off. At least anyone reading this review won't get blindsided.

It gets two stars for me, but that's only for the humor value. Watch it if you want to laugh, but don't expect much else.

I rented this movie because the box promised to be full of gore, nudity, etc. Sounds all good & well, but once you put the movie in, you'll find a cheaply made independent film, which is about trying to sway the nonbelievers in with the Christians. If you're a Christian, though, you probably wouldn't like it anyway unless you love gory movies. I have to give it that. It's got some very gory scenes.

Run away, run away! You or I could do better with a video camera, a six pack and two or three buddies on a Friday night. The only reason I stayed on to watch half the movie is that the first minute is interesting. Also, I was in a state of horror - at the abyssmal quality. I did not know it was possible to make such a bad movie. It is kind of awe-inspiring in that regard.

13 Seconds is by far the worst movie I have ever seen. The problems with the movie are almost endless and it would be more accurate to just call the movie in its entirety one giant problem. The movie is shot on a single camera, so conversations seem like they were shot line for line with the camera turning between cuts. The result is the most unbelievably emotionless acting ever witnessed. It may be puzzling at first as to how anyone on the face of the planet could lack so much emotion in the face of bleeding phones and axe wielding epilepsy victims, but upon closer inspection you can see in several scenes the actors reading off of cue cards.

But here's the crazy thing about 13 Seconds. It is undeniably the worst movie ever created, but in it's own twisted way, it has a sort of Kindergarten charm to it. After watching the movie, taking a step back, and really thinking about what happened...the movie works. Yes, it's terribly shot, and yes the acting is abysmal, and yes it's one of the most dull movies created, but the story...the bare stripped down story is actually pretty interesting, and in the hands of ANYone else could have ended up being worthwhile. That alone is the only thing that saves 13 Seconds from being the worst movie that ever COULD be created. But even though the movie is bad, the fact that it's THAT bad, ironically makes the movie great. I've seen this beautiful ball of garbage three times and would see it again in a heartbeat. 13 Seconds really does make you appreciate cinema more, because yeah, a movie could be bad...but was it 13 Seconds bad? Forget Uwe Boll, Jeff Thomas is the new Ed Wood and I want more.

This is a great flick during which to do Mystery-Science-Theater-esque jokes. The plot has a few holes, and the dubbing is not the best. The premise is borrowed from Jacob's Ladder tilted with the story of most early 1980's budget horror films.

Much of the acting is a little understated *cough* robotic *cough*. Daniel Rain and Daniel Rowe seem to be the most natural, but Jeff Thomas's character seems a bit difficult to relate to as a lead.

The visuals and sounds seem fairly well-done and the atmosphere and story are fairly intruiging to fans of the genre.

The film is a little upscale of the 80's b-movies, but not quite as well-detailed as most well-circulated indy films. For $5 (the current price as of 8/26/06) it'd be worth any horror fans to pick up.