College student Laura Breckenridge has just finished a heavy drinking and partying session, when driving home she nearly has an accident, and swerves wildly. At home, she’s alarmed to hear some weird noises coming from the garage. Upon inspection she sees a half-dead man (Kevin Corrigan) stuck to the bottom of her car! When he makes a sudden move, she freaks out and kills him with a few impactful swings of a golf club. But this being a horror film, the guy (a respected but bi-polar teacher who hasn’t taken his meds) is not done yet. Christopher Shand plays Breckenridge’s completely obnoxious, disbelieving boyfriend, who sadly, does not get whacked with a golf club.
This Enda McCallion horror-thriller earned my ire pretty much upfront for its use of digital filmmaking, a trendy but often completely ugly technique that more often than not renders a film unwatchable (It ruined Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies”, for instance, which should’ve been operatic, opulent, and filmed on celluloid). Here there’s some colour, but often too much emphasis on murky browns. And when we get to night scenes? Oh dear! White/yellow lighting? That’s even worse, making it damn near impossible to see anything. Normally I love the use of fog, but when you add it to the digital photography and bright lights, you get lots of smudges on screen and it’s unbearable. I really want to know what the validity of this kind of filmmaking is, outside of the Dogme movement, and even then I still hate DV filmmaking. I’m glad we’re not getting the puke-and-bile style of cinematography and set design for a change, but this is no better. It looks cheap and ugly, and had the film been shot on celluloid, it would be significantly better. DV really is that counter-productive.
Points off for the aggravating “Requiem for a Dream” rip-off, sped-up pill-popping scenes and use of split-screen for absolutely no good reason at all. The film is also slow, taking absolutely forever to get to its all-too obvious point (not that there’s much going on!), and completely unconvincing. Not implausible (it’s based on a real-life case, apparently), just totally unconvincing as presented here. It’s not even scary, barely even counting as a horror film if you ask me.
Another issue with this film that seriously bothered me (aside from the a-hole behaviour of Breckenridge’s dropkick boyfriend) is its treatment of sufferers of bi-polar disorder. I know nutters and psychos are a horror staple, but there is just something fundamentally wrong and genuinely offensive about specifically featuring a real-life disorder for the purposes of a horror film stalker. Not only that, but it does real-life bi-polar sufferers a true disservice by not accurately depicting the illness on screen. I know plenty of other films do it too, but most aren’t stupid enough to actually identify the specific illness on screen. Besides, Corrigan ends up looking uglier and bloodier than “Cujo” by the end. The cast and crew all ought to be ashamed of themselves in that regard.
If the film has any redeeming feature at all, it rests solely with lead actress Breckenridge, who despite her character is an immensely likeable and seriously beautiful presence on screen. If this world were fair and just, she’d be a major star by now. Instead she’s stuck in garbage like this.
OVERALL SUMMARY
I simply didn’t find this one remotely appealing, in fact, it was kinda foul, really and not at all scary or interesting.
