Headhunter (2005)

Headhunter Movie ReviewSynopsis: This movie is a horror/thriller centered around Ben (Benjamin Parrillo) who is not so fond about his work. He gets in contact with Sarah (Kristi Clainos) a headhunter who he starts working for. He gets a job at an office at night, that soon becomes a strange and creepy place. Strange things happens there as he starts to realize that things are not what he expected. He soon finds out this headhunter Sarah is not who Ben thought she was. He now starts to investigate around this Sarah and things starts to come out in light. Acting: The acting in this movie was very poor actually. Benjamin Parrillo mostly played in episodes of TV shows did not do a very good job in this movie acting wise. Matt Bushell also this typical known for TV shows did not bring any notably good acts here but he was not very much represented in the movie. Kristi Clainos is also mostly known for TV shows but she did the best job in this movie in my opinion. Very beautiful actress that could have made it into bigger movies or at least more movies. She makes a good effort in this movie as the headhunter would love to see more of her. She actually was cast in the last minute as Sarah Tierny in this movie.Cinematography: The first impression of the movie was very bad for me personally. I love to look at movies not just for the story or acting but I am giving out points for camera handling and camera angles. This movie had nothing to speak of with the camera angles everything was shot pretty much in the same view all through the movie. The sets was OK but the lighting specifically in the darker scenes was bad. Costume/Make-up: The costumes are really OK nothing out of line of this movie and its setting. The make-up is another story. They use very much CGI and as a fan of the 80's horror and slasher movies they could have done a lot better in this one. This is the era of CGI and when you don't have money for it don't ruin the movie with that sort of thing. All the faces from the ghosts and such in this movie is CGI made. Why not just use simple make-up it would look much better. Even a Halloween mask from a store could have saved them from this. And then I would have given it a better score. In a scene where someone loses a hand they even use CGI for that so you can see the bones sticking out of the arm, but the CGI is so bad that it look too silly. In my opinion they should have dropped the CG in this scene and just shown that she had no hand and used the blood. And for that matter the blood looks very good in this movie so they score points for that.Music/Sound: The music is very bad it does not fit much in with this movie, and the sounds just slipped my mind, and for me the sounds in a horror movie are some of the most important things. I can't even remember the sounds after I watched this.Summary: My conclusion after this is I am left with a bad movie that have a story and ideas that are very good actually for a horror movie. I would never recommend this to anyone. Maybe if you are a very big horror fan you might like some parts of it. For me I am a very big horror fan but it lacked almost everything a horror movie should have. But as I said before in this review Kristi Clainos did a good job and scores the only points for me in this movie. Paul Tarantino the director of this movie have only made one more movie the same year this one came out. He have some cool ideas but it needs work.

I purchased this movie sight-unseen at a video rental chain that was going out of business, so I can't complain as it probably cost me about a dollar. It is, of course, a very low-budget independent horror film. I've seen a number of movies that fall under this category, so I'm no stranger to incompetence and utter crap when it comes to movies.First, it should be noted that from a technical perspective, this was a reasonably well done movie. I've seen independent horror flicks where the creators couldn't even figure out how to get the sound and light done right. Even the acting here isn't terrible; the leads do, at very least, seem to have some training in the art.Okay, so now I've just written two paragraphs that amount to my telling any reader that this movie could be much worse. Make of that what you will.Doug Bennett (Mark Aiken) is trying to move up in the business world, and finds himself an aggressive agent, Sarah Tierney (Kristi Clainos), to place him into a higher salary. He starts a new job on the graveyard shift and, well, that's where it gets weird. The only people he comes across in the way of coworkers is some guy who just yells and runs at him, then vanishes without a trace. There's also some mysterious voice on the intercom and the agent (actually a headhunter, or so they say) gets naked and seduces him for some reason. Like I said, it does get weird.Doug later discovers that Sarah is some sort of ghost or other undead beast (complete with a little full-frontal nudity) and she's trying to use this late-night office job as a means of coming back to life, or something like that.Really, the biggest weakness of this movie is the script. Most of the criticism that I share with many of the other reviewers is that this was not well written. It sort of reminds me of the type of movies that get played at two in the morning on basic cable stations. It's a good movie to make out to, but not as good as Schindler's List.

First, let me say that I've found films from Xenon Pictures to be consistently "a little bit better" than many other film labels. They just seem to get more for the limited budgets and the films tend to have more personality. "Headhunter" (not to be confused with "Head Hunter" or "Head-Hunter") continues this tradition. The acting and special effects are much better than most of the other B-movie junk out there.Second, I found that this move improved quite a bit in the second act, after moping through a very slow start. Don't be put off by the first 20 minutes, which are pretty mediocre.Finally, please bear with me as I get on my soap box to ask, "Do any young screenwriters finish school?" Or, rather, "Do they pass English class?" Here's a film which undoubtedly consumed many months of the production crew's lives and took I-don't-know-how-long to write. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of crew members on the set. In spite of all this, nobody thought to point out that you spell it "cemetery," NOT "cemetary." I don't know about you, but it sort of takes the starch out of a scary scene when the protagonist drives up to a huge engraved sign that says, "XXXXX Cemetery". Also, somebody needs to let the prop people know that the possessive form of "it" is not "it's," so the fake newspaper articles look at least a tad more realistic. I'm not even going to start on the difference between "there," "their" and "they're"....Yeah, I'm being a Grinch, but you'd think that someone somewhere would pick up a dictionary or use a spell checker.Overall, much better than most of the horror dreck that's being served up direct-to-video.As a final stinger, I've just noticed that the IMDb spell checker doesn't note that "cemetery" may be a misspelling. It is. Hmmm...let me try it without the quotes: cemetery. No...the IMDb spell checker needs to go back to school, too.

Saw this movie at Dances with Film and thought it was really well-done. There are moments when you can see that the budget wasn't huge, but not many. Overall, the direction, acting, and story were very strong. I saw one of the director's first films, "Courting Coutrney," and that was a refreshingly original romantic comedy. Here he displays a real knowledge of what makes an offbeat horror film good; a creepy setup, dark humor, good looking girls, and delivering the gore when needed. Impressed also by the CGI. This was a fun but dark film that shows Paul Tarantino has talent. When this comes to DVD I hope other can check it out and see for themselves.