Totem (1999)

Totem (1999)

Directed by: David DeCoteau

Starring: Jason Faunt, Marissa Tait, Eric W. Edwards

Oh, Charles Band, why won’t you just stop making movies? Yeah, Totem is produced by Band, who seems to aspire to be the next Roger Corman, and who’s most famous for his Puppet Master movies, which really comes through in Totem, as I think they just painted a couple of the puppets black and reused them. I hate Charles Band and everything he stands for.

At the beginning of the movie we see a serene country cottage with six teenagers in it. Unlike you might think, they aren’t there for one of their SATANIC NINTENDO DRUG ORGIES (or whatever it is kids do these days), but have instead been inexplicably pulled there by some force which is also keeping them from leaving. After introducing us to our main characters (including one guy who was on Power Rangers! Wow! The star power!) and the premise of the movie, they all learn that they can in fact leave at least a little bit and find a cemetery full of cardboard tombstones and a “totem pole,” which is actually just some concrete shelves with little puppets on them.

Soon people start dying, and it’s revealed through a flimsy plot device that there’s some sort of ritual going on, where there have to be three people to kill three other people, one each. The kids display astounding levels of stupidity as they try to save themselves, but nothing doing, they fail. There’s a climactic scene where the murderees come back to kill the murderers, but this fails because… of… well, now that I think of it, I’m not exactly sure why this fails. Anyway, there’s about fifteen minutes of people rolling around in zombie outfits and then I guess the good guys win. Huzzah.

The most notable part about this movie is not the really poorly made/controlled puppets, but the startling idiocy of the characters. It’s not just that they don’t figure one of the clues out before it’s too late or something, that’s standard horror movie stupidity. No, instead these people are presented with a bunch of clues that they completely fail to make any headway on at all, instead having to receive their backstory through the first dead lady who keeps talking in a made-up language that one guy can understand (and even then they don’t believe him). This movie is like watching a bunch of four year olds trying to solve the mystery of who ate the last cookie out of the jar (while we, the audience, know all along it was just that stupid dog again, I mean look at him over there, there’s still half a cookie in the bowl, dammit!), and you constantly want to just grab them and say “LOOK! OVER THERE! THAT’S WHO DID IT! NOW GO TO BED!”

Not counting my awesome cookie metaphor, there really isn’t anything worthwhile about this movie at all. It looks like a student film, and feels like a HIGH SCHOOL student film, but the film crew had been working on movies for some twenty years. Sigh…