Dead Man's Shoes
 The Angry Princess  rates it:    Community rates it:
   409 of 843 readers found this review helpful.

“Dead Man's Shoes” came to me without a CD cover to even give me a hint of what I was about to watch. Unfortunately, I tend to judge buying the movie by what's on the cover. I was thinking it might be another scary movie, but it wasn't at all what I had expected it to be.

It was about a man named Richard who comes home from the army to avenge the cruel pain and humiliation that his mentally challenged brother Anthony suffered for the amusement of others. A group of men force him to get high, feed him acid, coerce him to do things he doesn't understand then take him to an old castle telling him it's the devil’s house and leave him there.

Within the opening credits is tons of home video footage of two brothers growing up. From babies to children you see them playing together on a playground, opening Christmas presents, spending time with their family. There is enough for you to figure out in the first scene that it is them walking down the long winding road until they get to the old broken down Knotson's farm. Throughout the movie, flashbacks slowly piece together what exactly happened that day and what caused Richard to come home from the Army in a fury to off each man that was present that day one by one. Each in a different way.

The only thing that made me mad was having a hard time understanding what they were saying sometime's since they all had heavy Irish accents, so sometimes it sounded like they were talking with marbles in their mouths but that was only a small price to pay since I really enjoyed it.

One of the tormentors, Herbie, comes walking into a pool hall to sell off some pills and Richard intensely stares him down. Herbie says "What the f*ck you looking at" Richard's reply scares the hell out of him so he quickly leaves and heads upstairs to his boss Sonny's house and hands him the cash while grabbing a new bag of pills to sell. He then heads back outside where Richard pops up to apologize for his actions. You can see how Herbie was visibly shaken by the way he gets his ass outta there..quickly.

He stops at the apartment of two of his cronies who are reading porn magazines. As they smoke weed he tells them about earlier and how he figured out it was Anthony's brother Richard . The three of them had this genuine look of fear on their faces at the mention of Richard’s name. Spaced out Herbie goes to leave and as he gets to the front glass doors he sees an elephant. Now this was my favorite part- after getting his buddies downstairs to have a look they come back in and realize that the pill bag is gone and they go to Sonny's house to explain the situation.

Sonny, who is the boss that they are all intimidated by happens to answer the door dressed in clown make up. While they sit there, Alan shows up with the bad news of the first man down and how the elephant sprayed his hair two funky colors. They decide to confront Richard but as this happens Sonny shrinks away with his tail between his legs only to later show up at the old in shambles farm with his boys. He sends Alan off to get Richard out so he could shoot him from the convertible buggy that they are all jammed into. Well poor Alan ends up with a bullet in his brain so they all scamper away once more like little decrepit mice.

When all is said and done, Richard takes the last man remaining to the old in ruins castle and mentally makes him relive the whole experience. The ending of this movie was different, not what I had expected at all. I really liked this movie, it stirred up many different emotions in me - I laughed, almost cried, and hated some of those mean bastards, so I have to say 4 cans for "Dead Man's Shoes"

Added:  Wednesday, September 06, 2006
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