I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer (2008)

	Director: Stacey Edmonds & Doug Turner
	Starring: Jai Koutrae, Stacey Edmonds, Az Jackson, David Gamblin
	Run Time: 78 mins
	Certificate: 18
	Rating:

Plot
A cricket team are killed off one-by-one by a demented killer as revenge for them all bullying a child twenty years earlier. For their safety, the remaining team members are relocated to a remote safe house in the middle of the country. However the killer cricketer tracks them down to finish off what he started.

Review
A micro-budget splatter shocker from the land of Oz, I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer is as silly and derivative as it sounds and your enjoyment for this flick will depend on your tolerance for one of the world's most unexciting sports - cricket. I guess this has been released in the summer of 2009 to coincide with the Ashes but I'm not sure that there's going to be a lot of love for this sort of thing in the States where I'm not sure they even know what cricket is. The Aussies love it. The Brits love it. Former and current Commonwealth nations love it. But they're not exactly massive film markets and I just wonder who this was supposed to be aimed at. Cricket fans may be pleased, horror fans less so.

There's a fair amount of flair and creativity on display here and good use is made of the cricket gimmick but the material is just too bogged down with genre convention to be constantly entertaining and too uninteresting to really make a solid feature length film. I guess someone came up with the idea of a killer cricketer and then tried to create a film around it. What may have worked as a short film just seems too padded out, even for a reasonably short feature length of 78 minutes. The story isn't that engaging either and lots of scenes seem to have been included for filler reasons only. In a short film like this, padding out the running time is a crime. So you'll find yourself clock-watching in between kills. Part of the main problem in why the film doesn't work as well as it should is down the obvious pandering to the fan boy market with the inclusion of pretty unnecessary gore and entrails and arguably the most pointless and prolonged shower scene in history (there's even a special feature on the DVD to watch the shower scene uncut) featuring Miss Nude Australia. There's only so many cricketing quips and gags that you can throw out there too and this film goes through them all. Unfortunately they may only seem funny to about 10% of the audience.

At least the film delivers in the body count and the innovative ways in which the cricketer dispatches his victims. The violence is pretty brutal and constant use is made of the cricket stumps as weapons. The killer wears a modified wicket keeper glove - almost like some sort of Freddy Kruger-style death glove complete with razor sharp blades. There is also a cup (the protective shield that cricketers wear to protect their nether regions) lined with nails which is used in the film's most painful (especially for men) death scene. Don't forget the cricket bat too - plenty of people are smashed around the head with it! All of the kills are bloody, gory and sometimes a little too over-the-top. But they work well. And at least the characters are mainly men in their twenties and thirties and not just a bland concoction of lifeless teenagers. Unfortunately this bland array of generic-looking men don't give us any reason to want to root for them. They're so uninteresting that I almost wished I was watching stereotypical teenage characters being diced. The cricket team here are boring, dull and unlikeable and given little room to develop as characters. I know a lot of them are just in there to up the body count but even the main characters didn't appeal to me.

Verdict
I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer is full of cheap blood and boobs tactics to appeal to the horror crowd but the lifeless script, dull characters and idea that cricket can be entertaining just bowls this one out for a duck!