The last day of the Salem Horror Fest's first weekend had two movies. The second one is one that I really want to talk about... but I can't, because not only was it a secret screening, they also told us not to tell anyone that it was shown at the festival because they didn't want to put a potential distribution deal into jeopardy. This unfortunately leaves me with the first movie I saw that day...
Welcome Week: A College Horror Anthology (2024)
Not rated
Score: 2 out of 5
It's kind of a shame that the first weekend of the Salem Horror Fest ended with this, because I was not impressed in the slightest. As the title suggests, it's an anthology horror film in which every segment is set in college during the first week there, and there were a few cool ideas buried here. The problem is, not only were the production values extremely low-budget aside from the gore, but only two of the segments worked at all, there was a bad case of whiplash when it came to the general tone of the different segments, and the wraparound ultimately brought the entire thing crashing down. It wasn't completely irredeemable, but this is not a movie I can readily recommend on any level.
The basic premise concerns a student named Andrew Cross whose four older siblings all died in their first week at college. His paranoid mother, believing the family to be cursed, tried to stop him from going to college at all, and only relented after he went to a "military boot camp" first. Sure enough, in his first week at school the campus is stalked by a woman in a mask and a trench coat killing people. As he and his roommate hide from both the killer and campus security after a misunderstanding sees him accused of being the killer, he recounts to his roommate the stories of what happened to all his siblings.
The film got off on the wrong foot the moment it showed me a clearly fake plastic knife, the kind of thing you'd buy at Spirit Halloween, being passed off as a real one in the scene where Andrew is packing his bags for school. At that moment, my expectations fell through the floor as I began to expect the kind of film that Brad Jones of the web series The Cinema Snob calls "shot on shitteo", a movie where the filmmakers clearly didn't have any sort of budget or ability to manage a film production. From the subpar acting to a look that was barely one step above a home movie, it was clear that this was made by student filmmakers in such a manner that it felt like I was watching the bad student film that Urban Legends: Final Cut opened with.
That said, the low budget wasn't the real problem here. There are many no-budget films that managed to wring a dollar out of fifteen cents, even beyond just found-footage films that incorporate their low production values directly into their aesthetics, but this wasn't one of them, especially given that not only do its problems go well beyond just the production values, but one segment actually did manage to largely overcome them and accomplish something approaching genuinely good. No, the thing that stopped me from enjoying this was how incohesive it was. We start the film with two comedic segments, "Blood Stream" and "Sore Throat", the former taking the form of a YouTube livestream in which a guy suspects that his roommate is evil and the latter being focused on body horror, but they are then followed with "Freshers" and "Falling Into Place", two very dry and humorless segments that take their premises seriously. What's more, even within the segments we get character motivations that are frankly ridiculous, which worked when the film was trying to play the events for comedy but not when it was trying to establish actual drama and stakes. I was never able to buy into the "curse" surrounding Andrew's family, and given how many gags it made about it early on (for instance, Andrew wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying knives on him when heading to a party), I found myself wishing that this film just leaned straight into the humor and the farce instead of trying to get me to care about these characters, especially once the final twist goes straight into the most ridiculous soap opera territory in a way that was never foreshadowed and felt completely unearned.
Strange, then, that the one segment I did unequivocally like was also the most serious among them. "Falling Into Place", the fourth and final segment not counting the conclusion to the wraparound, was about a young woman grappling with the curse and losing her will to live in a way that felt deliberately evocative of The Ring, and it actually made for an interesting character study in its brief runtime. It felt like the makers of that segment, Katie Jordan and Cory McCullough, got a completely different assignment from the other filmmakers and went a lot more psychological, and it was enough to singlehandedly keep me from writing off the whole movie. I'll also give it props for some good gore effects in "Sore Throat", a short whose centerpiece is a man succumbing to a fast-acting virus that starts as a bad case of "frat flu" and gets even worse from there, and in the finale where Andrew confronts the villain. The effects were clearly done on a small budget, but they had energy to them, and it was in these moments where it felt like the movie the filmmakers were trying to make, a gleefully violent campus horror/comedy romp, came out to play.
The Bottom Line
I hate giving a low score like this to what were clearly passionate filmmakers who were kind enough to do a Q&A session after the screening, but even so, Welcome Week was a disappointment. Better luck next time, guys.
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