Break (2009)

Break: Directed by Matthias Olof Eich. With Lili Schackert, Esther Maaß, Ralph Willmann, Thelma Buabeng. Four young girls head out into the Canadian woods for some outdoors fun. They wind up running into 2 brutal and sadistically inhuman rednecks. A blood-soaked fight for survival ensues.

“Break is a movie in the vein of Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes, but not as good, not by a longshot. Itu0026#39;s clearly an amateur film with an almost non-existent budget, but the reason itu0026#39;s bad is mostly due to a multitude of bad decisions made.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe choice to make a cast of germans pretend to be Canadian is one of them. The cast are not the best actors, even in their mother tongue, but to hear them struggle with their broken english makes the dialogue even worse. The scripted dialogue is the kind that probably looks good on paper, but when said out loud, just sounds ridiculous. All dialogue is recorded on set, and is sometimes hard to hear atop of the accents. Thereu0026#39;s not much music in the film, but thereu0026#39;s a couple of songs in the beginning of the film and one at the end that are hilariously badly written, performed and produced and doesnu0026#39;t fit the scenes at all. The song that plays during the ending credits is the best one, but itu0026#39;s so cheerful and bouncy, it nullifies all the gore that took place just a couple of minutes earlier.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAnother problem is the cinematography. The camera used is a Canon XH-A1, a camera that was bad already in 2009. The lens is bad, almost blurry, and the colors are weak. The camera is handheld, without any form of stabilizer, neither digital, nor mechanical, and the image is seizure-inducingly shaky. Itu0026#39;s not a u0026quot;found footageu0026quot; film, so itu0026#39;s unnecessary and thereu0026#39;s absolutely no logic to it. Angles and the positioning of actors are equally bad, and you get a lot of shots of butts and backs and car doors and other interesting stuff.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eFurthermore, the editor has added a yellow-ish video filter that stays exactly the same throughout the movie, which makes it even uglier and sometimes too dark, even though the entire film is shot in the daytime. Just about every shot is too long and slows down the tempo almost to a standstill. I see why, because a properly cut film would have been around the one hour mark. Now itu0026#39;s barely 90 minutes. The filmmaker even manages to make a rape scene boring.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eOne of the funniest drawn out scenes is where one of the girls is trying to drive away from a bad guy whou0026#39;s shooting at her with a hunting rifle. Firstly, the car of course doesnu0026#39;t start. Super exciting! When it finally does, she slowly and very carefully backs up and then drives away like there were a pile of priceless porcelain on the roof of the car, all the while being fired upon by the bad guy, whose aim unsurprisingly is on the level of imperial stormtroopers.”