3/10
Strange mix of genres.
6 September 2011
Warning: Spoilers
Dead Hooker in a Trunk is set in Vancouver and starts as the academic Geek (Jen Soska) gets a text message from her friend Goody Two Shoes (CJ Wallis) who needs picking up from Church so Geek gets her sister Badass (Sylvia Soska) to pick him up, together with the drug addict Junkie (Rikki Gagne) the four discover that a dead body has been left in the trunk of Badass's classic Thunderbird, Since none of them know how the body got there they decide to bury the it in the woods but a growing list of coincidences & adventures make this tougher than they expected. From Cowboy pimps to serial killers to drug deals gone bad to bodily dismemberment it's a day neither of the two sisters will ever forget...

This Canadian production was written, produced & directed by the Soska twins who also star in it, to be brutally honest the two look quite cute & seem nice enough on screen & I do feel a little guilty for saying this but I really didn't like Dead Hooker in a Trunk that much at all. The script is a total mess that can't decide what it is or what it wants to be, like other's have noted Dead Hooker in a Trunk feels like a road film as the majority of it has the four main character's driving around into & out of various situations but they never really have any purpose or meaning & there's no great significance to anything they do. There's some exploitation elements with some cheap gore including someone having their arm ripped off but then simply sewing it back on & someone else having their eyeball knocked out but simply putting tape over the empty socket & again carrying on as if nothing had happened, there's some sex & nudity & attempts at comedy & humour which fall mostly flat & the script also throw's in various bizarre subplots that go nowhere like drug dealers, a serial killer with a split cock, a Cowboy pimp & a meaningless twist at the end. The character's are alright, some of the things they do just don't make sense, why not call the police when they find the body? Why not even bother checking she was dead? Why think nothing of killing a guy just because he was carrying a baseball bat? Why not try & find out who the hooker was & how she ended up in the trunk? Come to think of it how did they know she was a hooker anyway? At almost 90 minutes the pace is OK & it moves along at a decent rate but I couldn't get into it, there just didn't seem to be much of a story here so much as one loosely connected incident after another. The script feels like a collection of ideas strung together with no real connection, nothing seems to drive the story forward & the individual moments aren't that great anyway.

Obviously low budget Dead Hooker in a Trunk looks alright to be fair, it's not a visual masterpiece but it's competent enough. I can't say the look of the film appealed to me that much & the low budget does show at times, at one point the story starts after it's been raining & the ground is wet but shortly after the ground is covered in snow. The effects vary, there's some guts, some blood splatter & a few ripped-off arms but none of it stands out & it's quite flatly shot. The character Badass reminds me of a girl I know who really does deserve the name Badass, she is full of attitude & doesn't take any crap from anyone including me, in fact she hits hard & has given me two black eyes for being cheeky...

Filmed in Vancouver in Canada this looks OK & has reasonable production values, I have certainly seen worse looking films. The acting isn't great but again considering the nature of the production it could have been worse. The two Soska twins are probably the best thing about Dead Hooker in a Trunk, they look to be having fun I suppose even if I wasn't. Sorry girls.

Dead Hooker in a Trunk is an oddity, it's an exploitative road film that never really feels like anything. The story is all over the place, the mixture of genres is done seemingly at random & it's not even that nice to look at, I suppose I didn't hate it but at the same time I didn't like it either.
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