Customer Reviews

Sigma Die!

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm mostly at a loss to explain why I enjoyed this flick. Generally, its not very good. The plot centers around a group of sorority girls who jointly rent a summer place and are forced to have a rental live-in chaperon, and come to find that a certain someone is out to avenge a 20 year old incident. The actual story is completely inconsequential, and the fact that someone is stalking around committing murders is something you just have to accept without any real justification. But there are many acclaimed horror films featuring a killer without a non-laughable motive. And the actual scenes of the murders/killing aren't all that interesting, just a terse pop, then they're dead. But I suppose that's ok too. What it is...a bunch of sorority girls running around in skimpy outfits that, contrary to almost every review I've written on this topic, is appealing. Its not about the nudity (which isn't really all that prevalent in this one), nor are the women particularly attractive. There's just a certain je ne sais quoi to it that makes it a mindlessly entertaining bit of nonsense. Or was I a victim of the Spaten-induced standards adjustment?

Sigma Die! (Michael Hoffman Jr., 2007)

If you're pressed for time and don't want to read a full review, I'll make this short and sweet, so you can simply skim the first paragraph and go on about your day: Sigma Die! is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. If you have a choice between watching this movie and committing suicide, slather yourself with honey and have your friend stake you over a fire ants' nest. It will be less painful than subjecting yourself to this.

Okay, now that those type A folks are out of the way, let me explain a little. I love no-budget horror films. Watch 'em all the time. Most people conversant with the genre would take one look at a cast headed up by Joe Estevez, Reggie Bannister, and Brinke Stevens and flee screaming in terror; to me, that's a mark of quality. I devour movies like Killer Pad. I wade through scores of pieces of junk like The Bone Eater in order to find those few gems like Lockout that make my life as a film fan so rewarding. But there's a bell curve, and I forget that. For every movie in the top 1% that no one else has seen, the Lockouts and the Baby Blueses and the Shallow Grounds, there's a corresponding bottom 1% that will make you tear out your eyes in the grip of madness. The Zombies Ate My Neighbours: The Movies, the Spikers, the Sigma Die!s. This is a movie so bad that someone who actually has Pony Trouble! on his list of the thousand best movies ever made hates it. Seriously, you should flee screaming in terror.

Plot: a bunch of college freshmen rent a house. Some other college freshman come over for a party. Everyone dies.

Yes, that's it, and if that had truly been it, this would have been a stupid, but possibly enjoyable, little slasher flick. There's a good deal of toplessness, and when the ladies aren't topless, they're sitting around in little nighties and/or outfits made of nothing but fishnets. Yeah, okay, it's sexist and Neanderthal, but if you're a guy, you're going to appreciate that. But you see, here's the thing. We start off with the massacre; in the opening sequence, which lasts about twenty minutes, we see everything you got in that oh-so-detailed plot synopsis (and you'll be wondering, as I was, where Estevez, Bannister, and Stevens are). Okay... now what are you gonna do for the next hour, chump? Then you get the "one day earlier..." message, so it's not even a question of "here's the ghosts that will be haunting your new nubile teens". You're going to get "here's what led up to the murders". Which, also, can be cool if done effectively. "Effectively," in this context, means "any way other than it's depicted here". Now, I've gotten on movies a few times over the years for tacking stuff on at the end simply because it seems like they ran out of stuff to do and had time to fill... but in this case, they seem to have run twenty minutes short, so they took the climax, chopped out a bunch of plot elements and kept all the gore, edited that together, and tacked it on... AT THE BEGINNING.

I think the intention here was to make it look like this was some sort of mystery, a kind of "how did we get from point A to point B?" deal. (God help me, I have to bring up the ghost of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, and now that I have acknowledged it, it will be allowed to rest in peace.) Except that the pieces they chose to chop out to create the "mystery" are so inconsequential as to be ludicrous, like the sudden arrival of a neighbor who otherwise has nothing to do with the story. (When we get tot he "full recounting" of the events from the first sequence, he's in the movie for about a minute and a half longer than he was in the opening, and does nothing at all of consequence in that time.)

I wanted to stop watching this mess when I finally figured this all out, but by that time I couldn't. I had to see just how horrible it would get, and it exceeded my every expectation. This gained immediate entry to my list of the hundred worst movies ever made. The only reason it gets half a star is because I actually finished watching it. ½

This movie sucks more than Monica Lewinsky. In order to make a feature out of it, there are scenes which are repeated during the film. It's like a bad recurring dream.