Paintball

source: Paintball

** possible spoilers ** but to be honest nothing could make this film any worse. the acting is so bad . charters are non existent just the standard stereo type Europeans , only gave it a chance because niel maskell was in it and i got lot of time for him . but his shady American accent was shocking. the thing i didn't understand the most was the fact they were running around with there paintball guns like they would help them .. i just kept thinking there is someone shooting bullets at u drop the toy and f**king run . was beyond stupid . didn't even finish it . could only stand to watch 50 mins. i do like low budget horror but there still has to be something to it, other people have said it on the reviews but its like they just stole all the ideas from other films. just don't waste your time and skip this .. not even a one time watch

A group of eight men and women are secreted to a woodsy location. Let out of a rickety truck, they are revealed to be in a game of "Paintball". Given assigned roles (called positions by a robotic announcer), they expect to be battling against a like team for warrior fun, but it quickly turns deadly. A wobbly camera follows events, which are not as thrilling as promised. Unlike Richard Connell's similar "The Most Dangerous Game", there is very little story here. Another problem is character development; there is none, so it's difficult to care what happens to any of these people you see being followed around by the shaky cameras. ** Paintball (4/24/09) Daniel Benmayor ~ Brendan Mackey, Jennifer Matter, Patrick Regis, Iaione Perez

This film was awful, there is no denying that fact and i'm going to get straight to the point. I have seen a lot of films in my day and this has to be one of the worst. The acting was terrible, it was horribly written. Now the storyline was okay but still very bad. It never got into anything special, it only stayed on that borderline of story lines that we have seen in so many films now. The writer definitely had something that could have been great but the it just never took off in to a good story. I have said a lot of bad point in this review but the film did have some good scenes but other than that it was a really basic film. So with all that in mind i decided to give this a 2 out of 10 just for the simple fact that it was a good idea and there were some good scenes in it.

I don't exactly know anymore why I thought that "Paintball" could easily have been a cool and exciting survival/slasher movie when I rented it… Maybe because I went paintballing with a group of friends recently and you immediately link this game to adrenalin-rushing action and sportive kicks? Or perhaps because I have a tremendous weakness for equally obscure and similarly themed flicks from the 1980's, like "TAG: The Assassination Game", "Master Blaster" and "The Zero Boys"? All these flicks share the same plot, namely that a dim-witted but fun shootout game turns deadly when one or more participants start using real ammunition. None of them are to be considered genre classics, or even remotely great films for that matter, but they nonetheless provided pure and unpretentious entertainment. Entertainment is also exactly what I wanted to get out of "Paintball", but apparently that was too much to ask for … It's truly a dire effort, with an utterly dumb and implausible plot, and sadly also severely lacking gore, brutality and fast-paced suspense/excitement. "Paintball" is a European production – more specifically a Spanish one – and the creators obviously wanted to further exploit the worldwide impression that ALL Europeans are psychopathic butchers with a * for torturing Americans. Hence we're getting some kind of ridiculous mixture between the aforementioned 80's titles and Eli Roth's "Hostel". A bunch of people are in the back of a shaky truck, heading out to the remote Redwoods area and preparing themselves for a large-scaled and allegedly super-deluxe paintballing contest. Upon their first confrontation with another team already, it becomes clear that they are all defenseless puppets in much more sadistic and profitable game, run from an illegal control room somewhere in the city. It's kind of a dumb twist, if you ask me, but even more imbecilic than the plot are the totally bland and unremarkable characters. Each and every single member in the group of protagonists irritated me enormously, what with their whining and selfishness, and I literally wished for none of them to survive the ordeal. Director Daniel Benmayor also thought it would be a good idea to film all the killings from POV angle and through a sort of unclear brown camera filter. Result: the killings are hectically shot and extremely dull. There's nearly not enough bloodshed or cruelty for die-hard horror fanatics, let alone the admirers of the nowadays popular torture * genre. The film doesn't take enough advantage of the sublime forestry filming locations and we don't learn enough about the actual villains that are running the show. "Paintball" a complete failure across all departments.

Watching "Paintball" is like watching one of those studio montages at the beginning of a DVD. You know – the words say something like "celebrating a century of entertainment" as clips of memorable scenes flash by. Well, like those highlight reels, much of the best of "Paintball" comes directly from other films. At times, as I sat watching this movie at the Tribeca Film Festival, I swore I was watching "Predator," "Pitch Black," "Descent" and even "The Condemned." That's how closely this movie borrows from other flicks. And if you can recall those clips, you can splice together "Paintball's" plot. The film follows a familiar formula – cocky expert hunters become the hunted. In this case, a group of paint-ballers answers an ad to play in the ultimate game. Their opponents will be another top team. The location is a remote area in what appears to be a former Soviet republic. The objective is simple: capture six flags and collect goodie boxes along the way. Trouble and credibility problems start at the first flag when someone starts firing real bullets. So how do these pros respond? Instead of disappearing into the woods like good players, they panic and spend the rest of the movie making themselves easy targets by shouting and arguing – and walking along open roads and fields. It doesn't help matters when the women shed their camouflage duds. The group does press on because the mysterious goodie boxes offer survival aids like a bullet-proof vest. Teammates die along the way, but we don't care since the movie never gives anyone much of a back story and the constant screaming and bickering gets tiresome to the point it's almost a relief to have characters die so they'd finally shut up. That said, "Paintball" is not a bad movie. The action sequences really pop like bursting paint ball pellets, and there are are plenty of other shoot'em ups with bigger budgets that are far worse. The movie's biggest weakness is that by relying so heavily on other films for material, "Paintball" constantly reminds us these is better work out there – and it's already been done – so why not watch "Predator," "Descent" or "Pitch Dark" on DVD instead?

I'm reviewing this as a curiosity, possibly the worst I've ever seen. It's not one of those so bad it's good, more so bad that, yawn, who could ever care? So what are the problems? No story – but that's not unusual in a film like this. No characters – can also happen in this kind of softish horror, but there's usually someone, even if badly acted and paper-thin, to latch onto. Not here. Makes no sense – frequently a problem in horror of all kinds and here it's made worse by the fact that there's absolutely nothing to hook you in and pull you along. Unexplained stuff happens all the time - example: why not take the car with keys in it and how did we get from there to railroad tracks? Maybe if I'd cared even a little bit, I'd have paid more attention and just maybe made a bit more sense of it. So what does happen? People run around a lot, rarely for any sensible reason. They shout a lot, usually all at the same time so you can't tell what any of them are shouting. The women (and only them) scream, gasp and sob a lot – not that unreasonable when nasty stuff starts up, but I suspect plenty of men would do the same in the unlikely event that real life could ever be remotely like this. This movie is a perfect 1. There's nothing here worth seeing, the kind of thing I never get to see because I walk out/ switch channels/ throw the DVD in the garbage if even the opening 5-10 minutes are this bad. This time I made myself watch, waiting for something interesting to happen. It never did and I wasted 90 minutes of my life. Don't make the same mistake.

I guess pun intended with the summary line. The idea is really good, but the movie itself isn't. It's a shame, that they couldn't make something out of it. The title gives away a little bit and of course you can imagine, that this won't be a regular Paintball game, that you will watch in this movie. There are quite a few neat scenes, but especially one gimmick (where the camera uses a filter and therefor the picture you're seeing is "different") that it uses, wears off pretty quickly. Add to that, whiny characters (not all, but too many) and not that many different ones, so you could root for a particular character. It moves along too slow and any tension that gets build up, is destroyed pretty quickly. Some nice (gory) scenes won't help that either (not to mention, that some of them are shot through the aforementioned filter, which is really bad).

source: Paintball

A group of city dwellers go on an adventure weekend and encounter more than paint bullets. This is a low budget effort and it shows. The acting is amateur and consists mostly of shouting and the plot unfortunately is a cliché ridden mess. The camera-work is appalling as a lot of the time the action is filmed too far away. The premise is reasonable but it just doesn't work as there is absolutely no characterisation at all and therefore very little suspense is built up. It really is just people running around a forest and being picked off one by one. This can only work if you at least have some inkling of who is being picked off but the outfits the cast wear and the poor quality camera-work mean it could be any of them. Even the deaths are pretty lame. To be fair once there is one survivor left there is a brief spell towards the end that the film briefly sparks into life and a modicum of suspense is generated. This isn't enough to save the film but does stop it being a total waste of time. Overall this is a very poor film and can't be recommended unless of course you like people shouting loudly in which case you'll be in heaven with this.