Beefcake and Grammatical Atrocities in Hidden Valley

Have you heard the buzz for Hidden Valley: The Awakening?  It's being advertised as the greatest horror movie of this generation.  But it sounds utterly putrid.  A cliche plot, stereotyped characters, stilted dialogue, and bad grammar.

A dark mystery lies hidden in a small rural community as a chilling story unfolds about young love, life, and the extreme measures a small town is willing to undergo trying to win a high school championship.
The first rule of writing: cut back on the adjectives.
The second rule: cut back on the repetition.
You don't "undergo" measures.
And saying your movie is about "life" is like saying it's about "people"!

It's got a facebook page with random pictures of teen hunks, dead cheerleaders, and werewolves, and an official site full of gushing hyperbole (and bad grammar).

And a tie-in novel, incredibly, monumentally hackneyed.  High schoolers come up with better dialogue in their Remedial English classes.

"Well Sheriff...I know this is something you are not going to want to hear, I mean with your boy in the hospital and the town in a damn uproar an-"
He was immediately cut off by Tom.
Need a comma, and that's not being cut off "immediately."

"Yeah, yeah, I got everybody screaming in my ear and wanting to know what the hell is going on with this thing," he said as his face turned beat red. 
The cliche is "beet red."

He buries his face into his hands momentarily, then clasps them together in a sarcastically peaceful manner.
Changed tense there, and what is a "sarcastically peaceful manner"?



"And really, Doc, with all due respect, it really has been long enough...so, what the hell do ya got?"
Wait, I thought that the Sheriff didn't want to hear it, but now he wants to?
"Well, Tom, I am pretty sure it was an animal. I can't be sure without more testing, but there was most certainly saliva present on both of the boys.
Saliva was present?  That's how you tell that an animal bit them?  How about big gaping bite wounds?









But I love the line: There was most certainly saliva present on both of the boys.  I'm going to try to work that into conversations as often as possible.

Somehow it managed to land perennial gay-vague villain Malcolm McDowell, star of A Clockwork Orangeand Caligula, as "Dr. Marcus." He must be related to the producer.  Or the producer's GED teacher.