FORMAT: DVD
Do You Wanna Know a Secret? comes to us from Mainline Releasing, a company mostly known for their Skinamax movies. (The house in the film is featured in many of their erotic thrillers.) It was co-written and produced by none other than Del Tenney, the man who gave the world the immortal classic The Horror of Party Beach. It also stars Grease’s Jeff Conaway as a detective and Joseph Lawrence AKA: Joey Lawrence from Blossom as the leading man. Whoa!
Despite having all that going for it, it still winds up sucking.
A hot blonde’s boyfriend is murdered, and the killer is never caught. One year later, she and her friends go down to Florida for Spring Break. It seems the killer has followed them down south. He also loves to scrawl notes that say, “Do You Wanna Know a Secret?” for the friends to find before he offs them.
This early ‘00s slasher has way too many false scares, fake-out dream scenes, and offscreen kills to be worth a damn. Nothing happens for the longest time before most of the cast gets wiped out in short order. The murders themselves are mostly bloodless and forgettable (when they do happen on-screen that is). And for a movie from Mainline Releasing, it features no skin whatsoever, which is especially disappointing.
Things take a particularly yawning-inducing turn in the finale. That’s when all the standard cliches (longwinded explanation by the killer, victims propped up around in a circle, the killer jumping up just when you think he’s dead, etc.) are trotted out. You’ve seen this shit played out a hundred times before and done much better. I guess the makers of Do You Wanna Know a Secret? didn’t know the secret to making a good slasher.
Look fast for Greg Cipes, the voice of Beast Boy from Teen Titans as “Taco Boy”.
AKA: Dark Summer.
I thought this one was decent, the twist ending did surprise me and it was nice to actually see an African-American character survive in a horror film as that's not too common(especially not in the 2000s).
ReplyDeleteInteresting fact, this film was actually the basis of a sequel to the german slasher "The Pool", basically what happened was somebody redubbed this film in a foreign language to make it so that it took place after that film and filmed a new opening murder and released it to theaters, The Pool 2 has not been seen since it's theatrical run in the mid-2000s(i'm guessing due to the questionable legality of dubbing over this film to make it a sequel to another movie).