Audience Member
Loaded (Anna Campion, 1994)
Anna Campion is the older sister of Jane Campion. Jane is a noted, and notable, director (Sweetie, The Piano, etc.). Anna directed only a single feature film, 1994's Bloody Weekend, re-released under the name Loaded. It would be, for many reasons and not all of them related to the respective genres the two sisters worked in, ridiculous to compare this film to anything Jane Campion ever did. But that comparison, wanted and warranted or not, hangs over Loaded at every turn, and I cannot claim that it did not color my judgment here. Your mileage, as always, may varythough judging by the film's 4.7 IMDB rating (as of March 2014) and woeful score at Rotten Tomatoes (they do not do percentages until a certain threshold of review has been reached, but the movie has no fresh reviews and four rotten ones as of this writing), it probably won't.
Plot: Seven young-and-beautifuls (whose ranks include Thandie Newton, Catherine MacCormack, Oliver Milburn, and a couple of other faces you are likely to recognize twenty years later) head off into the British countryside to make a movie. It is ambitious, well-meaning, and impossibly bad. Things start off all right, but tempers start fraying for various real and imagined slights. Then someone breaks out the LSD.
I have read at least one review of this film expressing confusion at where the title came from. I'm not sure how that's possible, considering that my biggest problem with this movie, as it is with so many movies of this stripe, is that Campion, who also wrote, uses drugs as a plot device. For me, that's pretty much instant failure in a screenplay. The movie was already headed downhill, and it felt (as it so often does) like the writer used it as a desperation move. That it immediately transforms the movie into a morality play is a given, and from there the outcome is assured. Predictability, however, is only the surface symptom of the disease that riddles the scriptit didn't know where it was going. Some decent acting by the cast, but they didn't have anything worth acting to work with. **
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
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Audience Member
Between a 4/10 and 5/10, Campion might have taken the same plot and used it successfully to study individual aberrance. But as it stands, "Loaded" is a well-intentioned, self-important mess.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/25/23
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don s
Another movie that has no purpose being on a horror compilation DVD of with a theme of Hatchets and Cleavers. Just because these teens are filming a horror movie (with the worst plot and effects ever) within the movie does not make it a horror movie. This is a study in group dynamics and peer pressure filled with existential mumbo jumbo and rationalization of criminal behavior. It is crap, even with a young Thandie Newton participating.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
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Audience Member
This movie was included on a cheap horror movie DVD... The only thing scary about this movie was that someone actually paid to have this movie included on the dvd. Horrible acting, terrible camerawork, bad directing, plot that essentially doesn't exist, a soundtrack that could be better replaced by the sounds of someone taking a raging dump, this movie is the worst 96 minutes wasted of my entire life.
In short, THIS MOVIE SUCKS
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
02/04/23
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Audience Member
Mildly entertaining movie in the same vein as The Hole. Anna Campion is no match for little sister Jane however. An early role for Thandie Newton.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/17/23
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Audience Member
STrange and Intriguing.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/20/23
Full Review
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