1/5 Derivative and boring.
  by Robert P. Beveridge (Cleveland, OH)
Scar (Rahil Bhorania, 2005)

It has always seemed to me, despite the fact that I value things in movies like acting, soundtrack, and cinematography, that in order to show off all the technical details, you have to start with a good script. I've seen the odd movie that had a worthless script and was still great, but most movies where the script is bad are dismissable out of hand. Case in point: Rahil Bhorania's painfully stupid Scar, a no-budget slasher/ghost flick about a college kid who disappears at a remote cabin in the woods and the friends who go looking for him a year later. Yes, they wait an entire year to go looking for him (and one of them withholds critical information from the others that might have stopped the entire trip. If only he'd mentioned it).

Stephen Goetsch, one of the brilliant minds behind the recent reality series I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant, and first-timer Bhorania co-write this tale of... well, I kind of gave you the entire plot synopsis in the opening paragraph. The cast is your usual blend of Z-list stalwarts (Dee Wallace, Joe Estevez) and wannabe up-and-coming actors (the leads are Randy Wayne, recently of The Haunting of Molly Hartley, and Ashley Nelson, who was out of acting work for four years after this). It might have achieved a kind of forgettable mediocrity had the script not been all but unintelligible for the opening sequence, and trite for the rest of its length. I find it very odd that with all the examples we've had over the years of how to successfully subvert horror cliché and still make a fine, and scary, movie, that people are still making this sort of derivative dreck. *