User Reviews

If you like gore, then Vlog is for you.

Starring Brookes Marks who plays her Vlogger-self Brookes Marks, Vlog tells the story of our usually underwear-clad Vlogger who decides to post the day to day aspects of her life. These mainly include her ever increasing-in-numbers sex, I mean, love life.

Brooke receives a strange recording directing her to a website that show a series of clips of her then boyfriends and friends being murdered.

The clips are bloody, gruesome and creative. I loved them.

There are discrepancies with the police work and club scene recordings but I can let those slide for the gore work.

Brookes is annoying but I still liked her. I wanted to see who she got killed next. And then the ending came, which is pretty cool, but the films selling point is definitely the blood and gore and if not for these the whole movie would've been a bit blah.

Worth a watch if you're into bloody scenes.

The trailers and previews imply this is a true story, even to the point of giving the lead character the same name as the actress playing the role. A lot of the movie is filmed as if it was a real video log, complete with the shaky, slightly out of focus recording.

It isn't, and they give up on the pretense quickly.

Minimal sex, minimal nudity, which seems odd for a porn star. Minimal blood, and a low body count, so you can't even watch it as a slasher movie.

Little more to say. I can't even rate it as a guilty pleasure.

If you really, really, really love Brooke Marks, rent it. If you have a buddy who loves Brooke Marks, buy him a copy. If you're wondering why I bothered to add this to the end of the review, it is because there is a ten line minimum on reviews, and I was done with this epic after only seven lines.

Adding that will probably get this review discarded by The Powers That Be, but I really didn't have anything else the least bit useful to add.

I suppose I could have recapped the plot of the movie, but if you watched the trailer, you already know pretty much everything I could tell you without spoiling what few surprises this movie has.

Vlogger Brooke Marks (played by Brooke Marks) posts the shallow events of her vapid lifestyle for internet voyeurs to enjoy, the majority of her posts centering around her love life with a succession of boyfriends. After receiving a mysterious recording directing her to a website, Brooke witnesses a series of video clips showing her friends being murdered. Naturally, Brooke fears for her life and goes to the cops.

Previous reviewers have complained that the character of Brooke is vapid and vacuous and, therefore, unlikeable. Those reviewers, I feel, have missed an important point. Vlog is a movie about voyeurism and is subject driven rather than character driven. We are meant to find Brooke distasteful. Her dismissive arrogance, particularly around men, is repugnant, particularly if you're a man. And yet there is a commentary here on the nature of the modern male and, when we see it from a female point of view, the portrayal is not complimentary.

When Brooke undertakes an experiment in a bar, using her cleavage and nothing else to secure a sexual partner before he even has a chance to get to know her, we see how Brooke finds herself objectified and somewhat mystified in the process. Undoubtedly she knows how to use her voluptuous charms to get what she wants (her opening gambit is delivered in nothing but bra and panties) but she lacks any real understanding as to why men find her so irresistible.

Men are a mystery to Brooke. Her amusing observations about men creating fake accounts as females on social networking sites then proclaiming to be lesbian in order to engage in cybersex with one another is wry, but telling. While Brooke recognises that she desires the opposite sex, men are ugly to her and their behaviour worthy of contempt, though her contempt comes with a perplexed smile.

This is the crux of Vlog, and there are some neat tricks employed to drive the point home. The gore is actually contextually appropriate for once. We, the audience, are drawn into the theme by finding ourselves witness to some extremely brutal and explicit gore. Did you come here for the blood and guts and shots of Brooke scantily dressed? If so, stay for the subtext. You are now the kind of voyeur Brooke finds so compelling. You mystify her, and yet she needs you somehow. The relationship between Brooke and her audience is dysfunctional at its root and this, of course, is the reason she eventually finds herself in deep trouble.

Unfortunately, production values are fairly low and too much is made of the final twist, which you'll see coming a mile off. The twist is also unnecessary in my view and doesn't particularly add to the movie, nor adequately answer the questions it raises. That said, overall I enjoyed this production (though I had to cover my eyes at points - gore isn't really my bag).

From the producers of SAW, VLOG is a groundbreaking extreme-horror film about a real-life webcam girl (Brooke Marks) whose online murder is not what it seems.

I have some issues with this film. First and foremost, I recently watched a movie called "iCrime" wherein a web star gets kidnapped. The feel was very different, but I think the overall inspiration was the same. And in both cases, I think the idea of a vlog is really stupid. (This film can be defended, somewhat, because it was made three years ago... why it took this long to get released is beyond me.)

I disliked Brooke Marks (the character, not the actress). Now, this is possibly the way I am supposed to feel. But she is everything that is wrong with a superficial, shallow culture. She uses people, sex is meaningless to her. She is vapid, and nothing more. When her friends start dying, I cannot feel much sympathy for her.

I take issue with the way the police are presented. Even if the police at first think it is a hoax or prank, once they begin to think otherwise, there should be a little better police work. Maybe an IP address can be untraceable, but I am fairly confident they could trace a phone call. And blood splatter, no matter how well you clean, is probably detectable with Luminol. I find it hard to believe that anyone can be completely vanished.

Those concerns aside, the selling point for the film (and what saves it fro man even lower score) is the gore. Great blood, guts, decapitation, explosion (and thanks for explaining how to make fertilizer bombs). The film takes such a drastic turn that it almost seems like a film within a film. But, hey, if it was not for these murder sequences the entire movie would not be worth a pile of festering dog spit.

As you can see from my summary, they are trying to play up the connection to "Saw". But there really is not a connection, at least no obvious one. Twisted Pictures was involved, but there is no actor, director or writer from the "Saw" franchise involved with this one, so if you need more "Saw" action, go rent "The Collector".