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53%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #9,028
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While a small film crew are shooting a low budget horror movie in a house in the woods, the lines between reality and fiction start to blur, and the movie slowly starts to turn into a "snuff" film.
--IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: November 11, 2005
Lacey Bickle (John Harrison) is a movie director who is putting together a supernatural horror film that runs something along the lines of Evil Dead meets The Exorcist. The movie stars the "real-life" (real in both the main movie and the movie within the main movie) couple of Barney (Bernard McKenna) and Rita (Debra Gordon), and has a crew consisting of cameraman Dom (Joseph Pilato), stunt-man / drug-dealer Nicky (Tom Savini), and gaffer Celeste (Susan Chapek). Without spoiling too much or going into too much detail, this movie-within-a-movie is just a ruse to get all of these people together in this cottage out in the woods; the actual production that Lacey is putting together is a snuff film. What follows is pure carnage, as both the cast of the film and the home viewers do not know which parts of the movie are actually happening and which parts are just being acted out for the horror film. A nice little glimpse into the current trend of reality television, isn't it?
There's a pretty interesting story behind the making of this film. It was finished back in 1979, had a few festival screenings, and then pretty much disappeared from the movie market. You see, thanks to a distribution deal gone wrong, it never received a theatrical run and never managed to get a home-video release; that is, until Synapse unearthed the film and released this DVD a few weeks ago. It's an interesting story, indeed... and the twenty-five year wait was worth it, in my view.
The storyline that comes together in the last half hour is what makes the movie. The storyline that builds up to this climax is pretty dull, to be honest, thanks to the fact that it moves along at an extremely slow pace. Sure, it's full of character development and whatnot, but there comes a time in every movie where the characters have been sufficiently developed and the director needs to actually do something with them. In my view, this part of the movie comes about twenty minutes too late... but when it does, you can't help but get sucked in.
Everything about this movie - from the cover to the plot synopsis and the people responsible for it - absolutely screams "horror film." That is actually not the case, as I found that this movie fits much more into the thriller genre than the horror. Sure, there's some murder to be found, and the movie-within-the-movie is a horror (although it really has no relevance to the main film), but as a whole, this movie would be much more suited to fans of thrillers than those looking for a good scare. This is actually pretty surprising, I know... I mean, we have Tom Savini in an acting role and also responsible for the effects, we have Joe "Day Of The Dead" Pilato starring in the lead role, and the premise behind the movie is a director who films people being murdered for a snuff film. But I stand by my initial statement; this is a thriller, not a horror. Therefore, if you're looking for a good storyline (one that admittedly drags, but is good nonetheless) with some great characters and twists, check this one out. If, however, you're looking for a slasher with gallons of blood and a double-digit body count, this would probably be one that you'd want to skip over.
Give it a rental if you're a fan of thrillers and don't mind a film that spends some time setting things into motion. As I mentioned, it does drag on a bit for about twenty minutes, but in hindsight, there were lots of clues being dropped throughout this time regarding the final twist of the film. With that in mind, I suppose that I shouldn't recommend fast-forwarding through this chunk of film, but you should expect the temptation to arise. Otherwise, the movie is pretty solid, and it gets a thumbs up from me. 6/10.
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