Art Vandelay When a movie is so badly acted do we blame the hack director or the D- list cast? It would be hard to pick out the worst performance in this cr@pfest. They all seem to talk like Canadians trying to sound like Southerners. It's almost worth watching for that alone. Maybe the actors were having a contest to see who could never get another audition ever again. And if you can't act you better be a knockout but beyond the lead female actress this is not the case here. In fact, the young blonde has a face that looks like it's made out of pieces from the Mr. Potato Head game. The story premise is actually half-decent but it's fleshed out by amateur screen writing that wouldn't get filmed as an episode of a third- rate X-Files TV knockoff. The monster isn't as horrible as other reviewers make it out to be, but that doesn't mean his movie is some kind of special-effect marvel. Actually, at one point a character is killed later in the movie and you'd swear it was an out-take from Farm Film Report on SCTV (anybody who remembers that show within a show will know what I mean when they see it). About halfway through I figured I'd finish watching it just for its camp value, which is why I gave it 3 rather than 1. The entertainment world would not suffer if anybody involved in the making of this movie were to never work again in the industry.

Scarecrow-88 The body parts of Chinese labor workers "melded together" thanks in part to a witch's curse (one of the miner's wives was a witch), and this "vengeance spell" has created quite a "gold monster" (an accidental detonation caused a part inside the cave to collapse, not only pinning them inside but destroying them) that is set free when a couple of local yahoos decide to try and get gold deep within it. The mine had been closed for some time, but greedy Billy Butler (Michael Badalucco), allowed to deprive whatever resources might be waiting inside due to his horrible ancestors who owned it for generations, needs financial properties that could exist. When the monster (it emanates a mist-like, gold-colored odor that paralyzes victims before it tears them apart) goes on a killing spree, it will ultimately be left up to a deputy with panic attacks and bad nerves, Todd (Robert Belushi, son of James Belushi!), and a coroner, Theresa (Cathy Shim), a Chinese-American beauty who has been helping him cleanse himself of his issues with falling prey to the incoming stress, to stop it. Jennifer Ruben (Nightmare on Elm Street III) and Marion Ross (of Happy Days) have paycheck bits as a mine health inspector (who can be bought as is the case when Billy offers her gold in exchange for her silence in regards to several off-the-code issues with the mine) and cantankerous speeding old bitty respectively. Both are victims of the creature (which looks like a walking mouth with teeth; its appendages are heads adding to its misshapen grotesque appearance), while the sheriff, Tatum (Carl Savering), begins to realize that stopping it won't be easy. When Billy realizes the monster "bleeds gold", his greed overtakes his common sense, and he decides to try and trap it. Tatum wants it dead, and so Billy will make sure (thanks to handcuffs) he doesn't interfere in his insane plot to capture the creature for its gold blood. Meanwhile, Todd's voluptuous teen sis, Veronica (Evie Thompson), her best friend (and Theresa's sister), Tracy (Olivia Ku), and their boyfriends (one is the sheriff's son, of course) all decide to go up to the other side of the mine for some beer-drinking and necking, not expecting a couple of posse hunters (brought on to help the sheriff kill the creature) to hold them hostage, awaiting the creature.Badly edited monster mayhem, some variable effects sequences of the creature, and dumb characters fit perfectly with the kind of formula often found on the syfy channel. Todd is a fun character, with his debilitating condition that often requires him to use a sack for breathing while his sheriff boss makes fun of him and ridicules him. Lucille Soong also has a rather entertaining part as the Chinese mother of Theresa and Tracy, under the impression that the creature has awakened, but hoping she's wrong about her bad feelings. Her "language barrier" proves to be amusing when Todd realizes she isn't as limited as he was led to believe. She is key to understanding the creature's existence and back story. The back story, I must confess, intrigued me and its tragic components are perfect for the kind of creature that derives from a spell cast by someone with revenge on her heart. Too bad the film is too lo-fi and cheaply made to truly do anything remotely interesting with that back story. Good for a few laughs, but ultimately, Heebie Jeebies falls into the same category of many of its kin: it has lame characters, lame kills, and lame special effects. Butler is your real villain of the film, an unsavory lech with gold on the brain 24-7. His fate is a nice bookend to a film which shows a gold "spiritual mist" representing the souls of those trapped Chinese workers being freed…the absurdity of this whole film is amplified by such an ending.

TheLittleSongbird When you think of SyFy, you think terrible acting and writing, amateurish-looking special effects, bad visuals and stories that don't grab you. Heebie Jeebies does have most of those things, but for SyFy it is a long way from being bottom-of-the-barrel. The acting is much better than anticipated, Robert Belushi is a good lead and Cathy Shim is astonishingly beautiful which does hold your attention(most of the ladies fare the same). The scenery and most of the photography is pretty and atmospheric, the gore is pretty good and the music is a rise above the often generic and sluggish-sounding music SyFy is prone to, not great but okay. However, some of the editing is to fast-moving and choppy, not all the time but in too many places. The monster is also the primary reason why Heebie Jeebies is as weird as it is, the design is unique but also very bizarre and somewhat amateurish too. The monster itself is uninteresting with little menace or personality. The dialogue is not that much different from most SyFy movies, the snappy parts come off as forced and cheesy and the more dramatic ones falling into hammy melodrama quality. It does also do a poor job developing the characters with none of them coming off as interesting. The story can get on the silly side- which is often too ridiculous and weird to be properly fun- but there is not much that is really exciting, fun or suspenseful about it(even for a movie that is clearly not meant to be taken seriously). The sense of terror is absent as are the thrills, the horror elements are rather schlocky as well, and the second half takes far too much time on the less important characters, none of them attention-grabbing and some even pointless. The death/attack scenes are handled in a very by-the-numbers way and are somewhat repetitive, the variation in how the monster kills ranges from very little to none. Overall, weird and not particularly good but there has been much worse from SyFy. Worth a look for curiosity and novelty value but not much beyond that, hardly a must watch or must rent. 3/10 Bethany Cox

GL84 After a haunted gold mine is reopened, it unleashes a terrifying creature trapped below that continues a rampage of vengeance against the town and forcing the local policeman and a holistic healer to find a way of bringing the rampage to a halt.This one turned out a lot better than expected and actually has a lot of good things going for it. One of the better elements is the fact that this one has a rather intriguing premise for it's monster in scaring them first before going for the kill, allowing the panic that follows to carry the suspense of the attack throughout before the main kill. Those are a lot of fun as well as there's a lot of brutality in the kills and has some real great bloodshed to go along with it, mainly because they're all done in live-action and up-close rather than lame CGI kills which would've been unrealistic. The creature looks scary enough and there's a couple really good action scenes in here that are pretty suspenseful, but it still has some problems in the creature's gold-devouring habits conflicting with it's mission of vengeance, a rather unsatisfying finale and far too much time goes by with it out killing people before they realize something is wrong, and only then they stumble upon the creature which doesn't make them look good. Still, it's a much better film than expected.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Language and underage drinking.