Creepy images of people seeing a ghost haunting them.

You know, I don't expect much from the "Eight films to die for." Honestly, I don't, I promise. Their whole premise is that they are eight films that "Hollywood doesn't want you to see" because they're too disturbing or gory or whatever, so the "8 Films to Die For" people collect these movies and show them in a festival and then release them on video, and horror fans who like their horror more hardcore can have something to whet their appetite. This is the premise on which all the hype surrounding the aforementioned films is based; something you can't find anywhere else, something creepy, something genuinely disturbing and scary. This is why I obtain movies like "Crazy Eights," because regular horror doesn't do it for me a lot of the time, and I want to see something that truly gets under my skin and bothers me to my very core. Well, "Crazy Eights" bothered me to my very core, but not for the reasons promised. This is, in essence, a movie about a bunch of people so stupid that the ghost haunting them doesn't have to actually DO ANYTHING to harm them, it simply assembles them and they decide to follow it when they see it, trap themselves in a creepy haunted location, and then continue to split up even after many of them have died, giving it free reign to torment them one by one. And it doesn't have to do anything to kill them, either.

The premise of the movie has a lot of potential. A creepy old asylum looks like a normal house, and the kids who were trapped there and experimented upon have repressed the memories, so they don't really recall what happened, only that they've always been close friends, and when one of them dies and leaves a note with a map basically saying "come here everyone!" they all return to the place only to find secrets buried there that they never imagined. Ok, I'm being a tad bit facetious but honestly, there isn't much premise beyond that, we get a group of people who at first appear to be normal but as events unfold the shocking part isn't how traumatized they are but how utterly devoid of intelligence they are. Seriously, who runs willy-nilly into a dark passage without testing the footing first? The death could have been prevented if the mental giant had thought to see if there were stairs at the end of the passage; and if he'd held his ground when he saw an apparition inside. And I know that seeing a ghost is frightening, but falling down stairs or running head first into spikes sticking out of a wall is inexcusable, even if you're frightened. The death by spikes bothered me more than anything else. How do you forget there are spikes sticking out of a wall? And the death isn't set up like this came as a surprise, the person merely sees the ghost, freaks out, and then backs up and stands still for a second before purposely dashing his head against the spikes and then screaming as if it were a surprise. Are we supposed to believe that he
forgot the spikes were there? I honestly had to rewind the movie at this point because I couldn't believe how stupid this man was and I had to see the death again in order to believe it.

What ARE we supposed to believe? The movie never makes this clear. At first we're probably supposed to sympathize with the plight of these people, because running off after a funeral and following a map written by a dead man who admitted that he was crazy is a good idea, and then when they're at the location the map indicates they apparently can't get out, even when they drive around for awhile, which means supernatural forces have trapped them there though they're all so unintelligent that we're inclined to believe that following a road is simply beyond their mental capabilities) and they decide to follow a path that leads to an underground chamber and the aforementioned "death by falling off stairs" occurs, and then they decide to split up, leaving one of them alone as "ghost bait" until their numbers decrease one by one. I'm not kidding, they leave each other alone over and over and over again, even when this behavior clearly results in death, even when one of them is rendered blind, over and over again. How are we supposed to sympathize with people like this? How are we supposed to connect with characters and care what happens to them when they're all clearly so stupid that normal human reasoning is beyond them? Most of all though, how in hell does this movie fit the original premise of the "8 Films to die for"? How is this movie anything that is dangerous or too graphic for theaters? If distributors refused to release this movie, it's probably because it was so terrible that they felt guilty releasing it upon an unwitting public.

After the first death, they decide to leave the person who has fallen down the stairs, and then they return only to find that this person is dead. Following this event, someone mentions that she thought he was hurt, but not dead. The inability to distinguish between "dead" and "injured" tells you everything you need to know about these characters. We can pretend that years of mental trauma left them damaged, but in all honesty, they're just too dumb for me to sympathize with them. Yes, if the characters were intelligent this movie would have been five minutes long, because they would have gotten the map from their dead friend at his funeral and said. "we shouldn't follow a map written by a crazy man" and that would have been the end of it. But their stupidity serves to further the plot, and for that I can't excuse this movie. One of the characters actually says "we weren't very smart" later on in the film, and I can't help but laugh openly at how adept this observation is. In fact, the whole conceit of a ghost haunting them could have been avoided if they'd realized that leaving a crippled girl sealed in a trunk was not a good idea. It's hard to sympathize with people that idiotic. Not only were you dumb as kids, but this
trend has continued until the present day. And further, I can't see what could possibly make this a "movie to die for." What about this movie could attract anyone to see it? Only if someone knew the premise and nothing more, like I did, could that person desire to view such a piece of cinematic swill. I can't excuse marketing a useless supernatural thriller as a "movie to die for" just to get viewers, and for that, I give this movie a kick in the face and one star as a warning to any unsuspecting viewers.