I Dream A Dream of A Better Dream: Heebie Jeebies (2005)

Heebie Jeebies (2005) (AKA "The Oak Hill Picture Show")

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Alex Balestrieri, Deb Billing, Amy Booth

Whoa, wait, wait, wait, let me get the story straight here: a girl with clairvoyant dreams gets a nightmare of her old high school friends getting killed off, so she fakes an invitation for a reunion and have them meet up at an abandoned, dilapidated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in order to protect them. At a farmhouse. A dilapidated and abandoned farmhouse. In the middle of nowhere.

...This chick hadn't seen enough horror films to know that is the stupidest place to try and protect a bunch of people from a rampaging loon with a machete, had she?

Well, to no one's surprise, as day goes to night, our killer starts skulking around the farmhouse to prowl on them and hacking away their heads. (Mostly offscreen, but have a nice way of revealing the headless states of the victims, plus there's a fair dash of gore to be seen) There's supposed to be a big reveal as to who this mysterious slasher is but it's hard to miss the fact that we have that one shmuck missing during an entire slasher attack, even more so when you only have five characters to work with, so it's not hard to figure out who's headhunting that night.

Now, it would have been a relatively short straight-to-video movie if Heebie Jeebies (2005) was just a straight-up slasher, so it also took the liberty of treating us with intermittent segments focused on our lead girl's nightmares, making this film an oddball anthology pic with a prank involving a moron with a prop scissor stuck on his head gone horrible wrong, gargoyle-like critters that only comes to life when its pitch-black dark (quite convenient for a low-budget shlock like this, am I right?) and a hit-and-run accident that gets worse when a good Samaritan suddenly gets involved. None of these are any better to watch than the main plot as they're all tedious, horribly shot, barely coherent audio-wise and crappily acted. Interestingly, only two of these segments tie in to the slasher backdrop, leaving the remaining one quite out of place, only adding more strangeness to an already bizarre bodycounter.

The last act fortunately delivers well on the stalk-and-stab action, but with very little salvageable at that point, it barely matters. I'm sure it looked good on paper, a slasher film that sidelines as an anthology, but with a lack of structuring, solid direction and proper ingenuity to work along its minuscule budget, Heebie Jeebies (2005) is simply a frustrating mess of a movie. Hard to watch with its distractingly low quality. Hard to sit through with its clumsy writing. Unless you're a curious horror fanatic or a die-hard slasher completist like moi, I say don't bother with it. You can do better with that video rental money...

Bodycount:

1 male decapitated with a garden shear offscreen, head later seen

1 female decapitated with a machete

2 males slaughtered offcamera, mangled bodies seen

1 male killed, scream heard

1 male decapitated

1 female bashed with a shovel, fed into a woodchipper

1 female head found

1 male gets a machete dropped into his face

1 female decapitated with a machete

1 female hit by a car

Total: 11