Movie Review: Keepsake (2012)

Directed by Paul Moore Starring Sunny LaRosa, Robert Pralgo and Barry Ellenberger

Keepsake is another in the much-too-long-line of abduction/torture /revenge movies that seem to be all the rage today. A precious few are thought out & well done, most are not, and then there are those movies that just insult the intelligence of those who watch them. (Yes, even people like us who watch torture-porn can be insulted). This one unfortunately falls into the latter category.

Our main character, Janine (Sunny LaRosa), is on the run from something when she runs her car off a lonely road late at night. When the tow truck arrives its being driven by a guy who's had his tongue cut out and who happens to be your average hillbilly serial killer. His name is never revealed so we'll just call him Hillbilly Jim. Janine is punched out after she makes an escape attempt near a gas station and when she awakens she is in a barn on Hillbilly Jim's farm. She is fitted with a shock collar and thrown into the cellar where apparently she is to remain for the next 30 days. Why that is is never revealed.

Janine soon discovers that she is not alone in the cellar either, there is a pretty decent size pile of dead bodies in various states of dismemberment lying in a corner. Occasionally one of them will rise up from the pile and lurch towards her. As the days go by the usual nonsense one would expect in this scenario happens: girl gets degraded, a couple of other girls are dragged in, tortured and killed, a couple of “tense” scenes at the dinner table, some random flashbacks and hallucinations, more torture....etc. Girl breaks free on day 30 and exacts her revenge, chopping off Hillbilly Jim's penis and lovingly placing it in a glass canister for a memento of her stay. Obligatory plot twist is revealed in the final moments....apparently Janine herself is in fact a serial killer. Who'd have guessed?

Aside from a horrible script, the main characters seemed to suffer from a severe case of mental retardation. Hillbilly Jim has many dope-filled syringes at his disposal but always forgets to use them until after his victims have taken a whack at him. The lock on the basement door is nothing but a simple screen-door latch and the girl eventually discovers how easily it can be opened, but the funny thing is, when she does escape, she doesn't run. She simply mulls about the barn, goes upstairs, finds a legless girl chained to a bed and then sneaks back into the basement and locks herself back in! T-total hell! Did I really just watch that happen? Yes I did. And it didn't happen just once but 2 or 3 times. And how could someone live in a confined space with a pile of rotting corpses for a month and never complain about the smell? And when the girl is let out to have lunch with Hillbilly Jim in his shack, she insists on antagonizing him to the point where he has to put her down with the shock collar. By the second lunch scene I was praying the guy would put her out of her misery with that shock collar once and for all.

The death scenes did nothing to enhance the story, it felt like they were just thrown in for shock value, same with the corpses coming after her in the basement. It was just a total mish-mash of random nonsense. I really have a hard time with these movies that are thrown together to cash in on a “craze”. Keepsake really does nothing to distinguish itself, and the frustrating thing is that it never had any intention of doing so. It seemed perfectly content being cliché and run-of-the-mill. I would recommend skipping on this one.

3.5 out of 10 Reviewed by KennyB