Good concept, poorly executed.

Admirable film.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Sometimes you can follow a tried and true recipe and still fail. Simon Says is just all around badly slapped together with stereo typical, empty characters, un-unique kills, a terrible killer and all of this packaged to call out "Blake Lively" on the cover because she hit it big a year later. For the record Blake Lively is in this film a total of about 15 seconds and its in the last few minutes of the movie. The concept of twins (one who is dim witted) seems like it could be a good idea for a slasher film but Crispin Glover who tries to pride himself on being obscure and unique usually just comes across as egotistical and annoying and that shines through in Simon Says. If his character had been better written he could have maybe done something significant with it. The rest of the cast, the older than teenage fodder for the killer are terrible. They add nothing to the story or the cast. Director and writer William Dear is not a newcomer to the industry. He's been directing films for over two decades and I think someone just gave him a few dollars to do his own thing but it just feels so slapped together. Every once in awhile, if you're a big horror fan like me, you will get drawn into the story briefly, or enjoy a really gory kill but then the poor cast and story and pace will drag it all back down. Unless you're just a huge slasher fan you might as well skip this one. 5/10

I thought this movie was entertaining, it had its flaws but delivers the goods. crispon glover is great at his part, i think he is an underrated actor, its good to see him on the screen( i loved Back to the future). i enjoyed the death scenes, although some were very far fetched, they were all fun to watch. could have used some more nudity, but at least we got a quick tity shot early on. i would enjoy a secon simon says. the filmmaking was alright, the river they were on is beautiful, i want to go there, maybe not with simon roaming around. my review is over, but i have to have ten lines to complete the review, so i will add that the lighting was OK, the acting was mediocre other than crispen, his acting was great. 6/10

A thoroughly bizarre horror movie in which a deranged Crispin Glover (is there any other kind) boobytraps a stretch of woodland with 1001 flying pickaxes and waits for a bunch of irritating teens to stumble onto the scene. I've never really understood the logic of populating a movie with completely unlikeable characters. It makes for pretty tedious viewing when the only reason for watching is not the hope that the characters survive, but that they will die sooner, rather than later. And the teens here, played by the usual bunch of pretty twenty-somethings, are some of the most irritating in horror history. Luckily, 'Simon Says' benefits from the presence of Crispin Glover, who is hilarious camping it up with a bizarre high-pitched accent that seems like a cross between English aristocracy and Louisiana Creole. He's clearly acting in a completely different movie that exists only in his own head and thank God for it. The kills are pretty creative and grizzly with a lot of messy dismemberment, but veteran writer/director Bill Dear has little interest in originality or developing any suspense or real fear. For fans of Glover's unique style, this is an often very funny must-see movie. For everybody else it's a pretty average teen slasher.

The wife and I decided to rent "Simon Says" based on its particularly nasty looking trailer and the fact that we saw Crispin Glover's name above the title, prompting me to joke "Cool, George McFly as a slasher!" We knew nothing about the film prior to stumbling across it on our cable's On Demand, and thus settled in for what looked like some goofy slasher doin's.I must admit, the first twenty minutes or so of "Simon Says" were pure torture. Lord knows I've seen my share of slasher films over the years, and obviously so have the makers of this film because the first quarter of the movie sticks so closely to the "rules" of slasherdom that it almost becomes a parody. When five teens (each representing a time honored Slasher Cannon Fodder Sterotype, of course -- i.e. The Brainy Chick, the Slutty Chick, the Jock Guy, the Stoner Guy, and the Yuppie Chick) pull off the beaten path to do some camping in a near-deserted small town, it takes them no time at all to get on the bad side of local hillbilly store proprietor "Stanley" and his retarded brother "Simon" (both played by Glover), so I was already thinking "Oh man, this movie is gonna suck." The characters were cardboard cut-outs, the dialogue was howlingly bad, and the foreshadowing (of what is supposed to be a big 'shock twist' at the end, which I will not reveal here but I'm sure everyone will see coming from a mile away) was so telegraphed that I almost considered switching the movie off. I'm glad I stuck with it though, because once the 'action' finally starts in "Simon Says," gorehounds will be in for one helluva nasty, gooey, blood-covered treat. Seems Stanley/Simon is quite handy with pickaxes and has booby-trapped the woods with some very original contraptions that hurl blades, gears, and other implements of death at our teenage heroes (as well as a few other bystanders who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) with lethal, often hilariously gory accuracy. It wasn't long before I was cackling as our teenaged idiot heroes were running aimlessly through the woods, being chewed to bloody stumps while Crispin Glover chewed on the scenery for all it's worth. The guy's always BEEN weird, and this movie gives him the opportunity to just go completely off the wall. He looks like he had a hell of a lot of fun in this dual role.By the tail end of "Simon Says" we even get a "dinner with the family scene" (when Stanley takes the lone surviving girl to meet "Maw and Paw" who are of course rotting corpses sitting around a table), providing another nod to many '70s and '80s exploitation/splatter movies and adding yet another level of sick weirdness to what was already a pretty sick movie. By the time this one ended my wife and I could only look at each other and laugh, and we've been making "You forgot to say Simon Says!" jokes for a couple of days now."Simon Says" is not a GREAT movie by any means but it's certainly worth a look if you haven't been getting your recommended daily allowance of carnage at the video store. It starts out pretty average but suddenly and without warning becomes its own weird and unpredictably hilarious beast.