2000/18/88m

“Family reunions are KILLER!”

Director/Writer: Neil Johnson / Cast: Emma Grasso, Jay Gallagher, David Vallon, Spencer Slasberg, James Giddens, Miranda Podleska, Izumi Pennicott, Jade Bilowol, Michelle Milne, Chris Heywood.

Body Count: 9

Dire-logue: “We’re playing this out like some B-grade movie. Five kids locked away in some isolated shack. When the killer finds us he’s gonna pick us off one by one.”

Oh, sweet Lord! If you ever thought nothing called To Become One could be worse than the Spice Girls song 2 Become 1 – think again! OK, so it was reportedly produced for $2,000, so well done filmmakers on getting that far. Positive attributes end here.

A surefire contender for worst of the worst, this Aussie flick changes genres at the centre point from standardized slasher to something that resembles that Halloween Simpsons episode where Bart discovers he has an identical twin.

A year after her mother was chopped in two, Melinda and her klepto friends find themselves being bumped off by a killer wearing a My Bloody Valentine-esque industrial gas-mask. Seven teens – nearly all girls – are murdered in the first half hour, with the remaining few under the illusion that driving out into the country will put them out of harms way. Said folks chat amiably some minutes after watching two friends incinerated by a car bomb. Once everyone who doesn’t matter is gone, the killer unmasks and reveals himself to be Melinda’s twin brother, separated from her at birth and on leave from the loopy asylum he takes her back to for a re-joining operation by a God-deluded doc.

The wheels finally fall off the wagon at this revelation and it becomes one of those girls-must-escape-all-the-gurning-loonies plots and characters thought dead return from the grave for a contemptuously predictable ending. The occasionally slick presentation does little to aid this festering turd of a film and the opening murder, shot in sepia and inter-cut with a small girl staring into space, completely defies explanation!

88 minutes of pain. This is the cinematic equivalent of root canal surgery.