The Helpers (2012)

Directed by: Christopher B. Stokes

Writer: Christopher B. Stokes

Some young people are traveling from some place to some other place for whatever reason and they have a car accident in the middle of nowhere. They walk to a roadside motel nearby and it happens to be full of wonderful people who promptly arrange for the car to be fixed and in the meantime offer our friends tons of free drinks, food and shelter for the night, which none of them finds the least bit suspicious, of course. But here's the twist - in the morning some of our friends find themselves dead, while others are tied up and watched via surveillance cameras by some "mysterious" figure. Hey, what kind of a hospitality is that? What kind of people are they? What the heck are they doing? Well, they first help you and then they kill you because they are... The Helpers!

 

I hope you are back in your chair after no doubt having fallen to the floor in shock and amazement by such a daring and original concept. But fear not - you'll soon find yourself on familiar territory when it turns out that everything in this movie has been done thousands of times before. Fortunately, Chris Stokes and his partners in crime bring at least some amount of originality by sheer ineptitude with which they abuse the whole concept.

 

I won't go into too much detail, because this movie is simply not worth it, and besides, you already know what to expect - irritating generic characters played by horrible actors, antagonists that are only slightly less irritating than the victims, dumb plot "twists" (if it makes sense to talk about them in a movie that has no plot), no imagination in killings (for example, they rip off a famous scene from The Hitcher not only once, but twice!), stupid screaming blonde bitches, completely pointless video surveillance scenes, jerk with a camera, et cetera. What stands out is the overall stupidity of all characters, which pushes the boundaries even for this type of film.

 

For example, I've already mentioned the victims' lack of suspicion about the downright weird behavior of their hosts at the beginning. When they have a car accident at the beginning, they simply don't walk twenty meters back to investigate what could have caused it. At a late stage of the movie, a "savior" conveniently appears and some of the survivors readily trust him, even though they had previously seen him with the killers (!). Examples like this are too numerous to mention. Add to that the obscenely absurd and ridiculous backstory (explained thankfully at the ending, when most of the viewers are already sleeping) and you have one heck of a failure. Just don't think that it's so bad that it's good. No, it's so bad that it's bad.