So after hearing about this movie and getting hyped up because Andrew Fleming, the director, also directed The Craft and wtf the recent Nancy Drew movie, I finally sat down and watched it. What I got was a big dose of meh coupled up with some good scenes thrown in there for good measure. It was just one big hit and miss, late 80’s horror shlockfest.
The movie starts out with the creepy cult leader, Harris (Richard Lynch), having a sit down with his Unity Field cult members and yapping on about some crap. Then they get down to the burn and all commit suicide by gasoline immolation. One girl survives, Cynthia (Jennifer Rubin), and goes into a coma for 13 years or something like that.
Upon waking up in 1988 she is put into a group for borderline personalities. At least they don’t play the “fish out of water” card and have a silly montage of her being exposed to the 80’s. Now when she gets into these group sessions the movie begins to draaaaaaaaaag on for waaaaaaaaaay too long. Lots of yap, not a lot of action. Eventually people in the group start getting offed one by one in a highly offscreen fashion. This is while Cynthia starts seeing a burned up Harris who claims that, since she is still alive, he and the rest of the cult members who burned are stuck in some sort of limbo. She believes that Harris has returned from the grave to force her to kill herself and until she does so, all the group members are up for the old slice and dice.
Eventually they throw the whole supernatural thing out the window and it ends up that all the hallucinations and other patients deaths were all drug induced by the evil head doctor or some shit. Basically this is where I got disappointed. I like supernatural evil. Evil doctors, not so much. Now evil supernatural doctors, that’s some serious shit.
Now don’t get me wrong I like 80’s horror shlockfest movies. I really really do, but this movie just couldn’t keep pace. The scenes when Harris and the rest of Unity Field are giving interviews to some reporters before the fire are good. Lynch really comes across as a psycho and the Unity Field members are just as nuts. Talking about how death is just another state of being and that killing someone is showing them that you love them, that stuff was money. I think I would have rather seen a movie about the crazy cult, ending with them all burning.
Another scene that really kicked the movie up a few points in my mind was when a couple of the group members sneak off to a remote part of the hospital to get up to some hanky panky. Now you don’t see it (it's one of those implied kills) but the scenes right before they get sucked into a giant turbine fan thing. The light was shining on their faces and they looked all nuts and shit. That was a good scene for me.
What I didn’t like about the movie was obviously the amount of time that the characters just sat in “group” and talked about stuff. I can't remember what they were talking about but I DO remember that I was very uninterested in what they had to say. Plus the ending was a huge let down. So it was an evil doctor all along? He was dosing the borderline personality group with different experimental drugs? Harris is just in Cynthia’s head and she’s on a bad drug trip? Too many questions for a horror movie.
Ugh, this movie is tiring me out but I have one last thing to say. It may have its flaws but fuck it, I’ll still buy it on dvd. I’ve bought worse, trust me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment