Director Best and writer Watt may have created the first mock documentary/filmmaking documentary/slasher movie ever and throughout "Splatter Movie" I had an impossible time trying to figure out where each format and genre began and ended. Starting out as a video journal that turns in to a documentary about making a horror movie soon becomes a bonafide slasher movie within the making of a slasher movie. As director Amy Lynn Parker sets up her chance to direct the ultimate slasher film, the preamble explains that she sought out to commit the ultimate serial killing spree that just takes on a life of its own. Sometimes it seems like writer Mike Watt can't quite keep a grasp on what he's doing because the concept is so intermeshed and off the wall, it's impossible to put it down in to one peg. The ultimate question becomes quite disorienting as writer Watt asks if this is a film being filmed that becomes its own story, or just a director who can't discern reality from fantasy and concocts a murder plot within a film within a film being filmed.

All of whom seem to be sharing some tidbits about making movies while this mysterious masked killer lumbers around on set knocking off grips and extras without anyone really discovering what's happening behind the scenes. This all should have made for some interesting meta-fiction, but as a whole it's droning and self-congratulatory at times. Sitting through the interviews felt like padding for the upcoming kills and I could never figure out why I should care about these people being offed. Intentional or not, the people being killed don't act as genuinely frightened as they should, thus all attempts at realism are completely lost and misfired. These interviews should have been compelling and they just droned on and on, the murders should have been intense and instead just feel forced and awkward, and the motivation for the killer in the end just feels completely out of left field where we seem to be building up to something dynamite only to be left sitting there thinking "That's it?" In the end, the writer and director have the right idea for a meta-movie that could explore the very genre it's satirizing, but it just feels like a recycled narrative placed in a fancy cover that really is just a slasher flick in the end.

While the idea may look incredible on paper, what shows up on screen is a flat, monotonous and convoluted mess of a meta-horror picture that begins as an intelligent exploration of the genre and just gives up mid-way turning in to a standard title in an already muddy facet of the horror universe.