Film Review: Mr. Cleaver (2018)

Rate This Movie

SYNOPSIS:

Some annoying people break into an abandoned warehouse only to be stalked and killed off by the weirdo that lives there.

REVIEW:

Mowing the yard. Doing laundry. Washing dishes. These are just a few of the things off the top of my head that I could have done that would have been a lot more interesting and entertaining than watching Mr. Cleaver. Have you ever watched a movie and thought “What the Hell am I watching?” the entire time? That pretty much sums up my feelings about this film. It is all over the place, looks like it was shot on an old shoulder-mounted RCA video camera from 1983, and has some the worst acting I’ve ever seen in my life. This was a very painful movie to sit through for several reasons and the fact that I made it all the way through until the very end is nothing short of amazing. I’ve seen a lot of horrible movies in my lifetime, but I can say without hyperbole that Mr. Cleaver is without a doubt somewhere close to the top of that list.

What makes this movie so bad? I don’t even know where to begin. I guess I can start off by saying that it doesn’t have a trace of originality as it is like at a thousand other similar movies that I’ve seen over the last thirty years or so. Normally I don’t really mind if a movie is somewhat suffering in the originality department but it’s like the people responsible for this mess of a film didn’t even bother to try. It makes the worst slasher flick from the 80s look like a masterpiece in comparison and if I didn’t know any better I would say that the whole thing was just a big joke or the result of someone being dared by a friend that they couldn’t make a movie with $15.00 and some random people that they knew (Spoiler Alert: They couldn’t). I don’t know the actual details as to how or why this movie came to be but if I had been a part of it I would have been totally and utterly embarrassed and asked to have any trace of my name be removed from it.

Another of the (many, many) issues that plagues this film is the fact that the acting is nothing short of atrocious. I have seen better acting in locally produced commercials for car dealerships and that is really saying something considering how terrible those all are. The only person that can act (Shannon Lark, who plays Melanie) gets killed off before any of the other characters so we are stuck with a bunch of people reading their lines (quite badly, I might add) for the duration of things. Like I said earlier, I am pretty sure that the filmmakers just went around asking random people that they ran into on the street if they wanted to be in a movie regardless if they’ve ever actually acted or not and put them in the film just because they happened to be available. To be honest though some of them may have been brilliant professional actors but we wouldn’t have known it because half the time the sound is so bad that you can’t hear what most of the characters are saying anyway (did someone forget to bring a boom mic to the set or did the filmmakers just not have access to one? I don’t know).

It also appears as though the entire movie was made without a script. Seriously. It felt like most of the people in the movie just improvised their lines and the things that they did because there is really no rhyme or reason to any of it. I don’t know if someone forgot to write a script or what, but it feels as if the people behind everything just had a vague idea for a movie and sort of put it together after they started filming everything. Most of the people in the film look like they are totally confused most of the time as if they don’t know what they are supposed to be doing so this theory may not be too far from the truth if I had to guess.

I guess the only good things about Mr. Cleaver is that the gore effects didn’t look horrible and some of the music that appeared in the film wasn’t too bad. I like that they only used practical effects and they honestly looked pretty good for the most part. A lot of the songs that are played during the film worked well too and were probably the highlight of the entire movie for me. There were several talented musicians and bands behind the music that was featured in the film and I wouldn’t mind hearing some more of their stuff to be honest.

I thought Mr. Cleaver was a total train wreck and just a complete waste of time in general. Nothing about it really worked by any stretch of the imagination and I can’t say that I particularly enjoyed any of it (plus I hated the unnecessary scene with the dog and the even more unnecessary disclaimer at the end of the film about animals that was painfully unfunny and lacking any sort of wit). I normally love low budget horror films but that’s because they normally have a lot of heart as there is a ton of love and effort put into them but that was not the case with Mr. Cleaver and it shows. This thing was just thrown together because a couple of people got bored and thought that they could make a movie and the results speak for themselves. It’s so bad that I don’t think that anyone would enjoy it to be brutally honest.