Alive or Dead – 2008
Alive or Dead starts out quite different from what I’m used to; a woman driving a car and having phone sex by cell phone at the same time. She soon reaches an open area and she stops playing with herself when she finds a bus with the words “Help me” written in blood. She does not seem to scare easily and explores the area and eventually gets trapped in the bus together with a redneck and a captured and chained girl.
Sounds interesting don’t you think? That’s what I thought but I never got the hang of it. The bus driver takes the bus into a dessert castle or something. Nothing is what it seems to be anymore. I don’t know who’s the victim or the perpetrator. Well, most of it makes sense in the end but it’s not very clear. I feel like it’s a bit sloppy script where there are twists and turns just for the sake of it. There’s no real logic to what happens and why.
There are some nice acting and gore though. I don’t mean to say that it’s a real gore- or splatter film, but there is blood and it looks pretty decent! In the end, this doesn’t carry the movie as a whole though. It gets quite boring and hard to understand. I can live with that if there’s a point made out of making it hard to understand. But here I feel like it’s just plain bad storytelling in Alive or Dead. I do love the title though. It’s more appealing than the dime-a-dozen phrase Dead or Alive would be. It makes me wanna watch it.
