The Tapes (2012)

(AKA Chav Nightmare)
Release Date: On DVD Now (UK)
Written by: Lee Aliston and Scott Bates.
Directed by: Scott Bates.
Starring:  Jason Maza, Arnold Oceng and Natasha Sparkes.

This movie is a right buncha crap iinit, bruv? Anuvva First person/Found Footage flick bruv, that uses shaky cam to no end, The Tapes is an exercise in tedium, iinit?

A found footage flick, The Tapes involves found footage of three chavs that went missing, that their parents thought "needed to be seen."  For the record, no one needed to see any of this.

Is that Hitler's face on the tree? If so, that non-Aryan guy standing in front of it should probably run.

Peep this plot bruv: The British version of Snookie from The Jersey Shore wants to be on Big Brother U.K., so she and two guys decide to make an audition tape of her, in some rural British village. While in the local pub, making fun of the local creepers and being obnoxious, they find out about a sexy swingers party that takes place out on some deserted old farm.

Still with me?

The three morons not only decide to head out to the farm to shoot the audition tape, but to hide, tape the pending gang-bang, and blackmail the attendees, all to make some quick money... So, trespass on some surly locals' land, invade their group sex privacy, and then blackmail them. (Right now I'm shaking my head.)

I'd totally blackmail someone who lived there.

As you already must know, things don't go exactly to plan. While investigating the farm, loudly, they find creepy shit laying around amidst torture devices and fetish gear; pigs heads, three tarot cards that seem to fit their personalities, hay... it's a farm, so there's some hay, leave it alone. Once the "swingers" show up, they don ritual garb and creepy animal masks, and are about to sacrifice a goat, when all hell breaks loose!

The Tapes is really one of the most frustratingly bad movies we've seen in some time. The writing and characterization are what really kill it. One of the posters on the movies IMDB board known as Slasher Guy, said it best "The horrible characters ruined any kind of potential that existed in this film. All it is is almost an hour of three chavs saying "bruv", "innit" and either arguing or being annoying twats." That's really the perfect summary of the movie's biggest flaw. Thanks for letting us quote you, Slasher Guy.

Morons.

Until the last few minutes of the movie, all we get is three annoying characters, acting like complete moronic assholes, being loud and abrasive, and practically begging to die painfully. When they're in danger, they argue... loudly. They're hiding in the barn of a Satanic Cult, and they argue, the woman being loudest of all. She doesn't care about safety or stealth, she cares about being heard and how no one tells her to be quiet.! They should have been discovered much earlier, as they had plenty of full discussions involving loud laughter in plain sight of the people they were hiding from.

The cult itself, The Brotherhood of Beelzeeebub (which is spelled wrong to begin with), is not scary at all. There was definitely potential for some frights here, but most of it, especially their costumes and masks, felt more comical than anything. We didn't even really get to see anyone be killed on screen. At the end we get the standard "so and so is still missing" and "The Brotherhood of Ball-sack are still out there, and untraceable!" which really made us think "who cares?"

Honestly? LOL!

It's bad enough making a movie about chavs. It's a whole other level of bad though when you make a found footage flick that's 80 minutes of chavs doing little more than talking, and acting like morons. Movies like Harry Brown, Neds, Eden Lake or Attack the Block are full of them. Hell, even Demons Never Die, which we just reviewed in the post below this one, is full o' chavs. They don't usually work as sympathetic characters.

This was actually kind of creepy, but we only saw it for a few seconds.

The Tapes is far and away the worst Horror flick we've seen this year so far, and will most likely be in the running for worst of the year come December. Aside from the interview clips with the victims' families, which weren't too bad at all, this movie is nothing but aggravating and poorly conceived. See it as a morbid curiosity if you like, but you'll most likely be sorry if you do.

Her boobs are in this?