Sign up to add this to your collection
|
Sign up to add this to your favorites
|
|
34%
Overall Rating
|
|
Ranked #12,287
...out of 20,684 movies
|
Sign up to check in!
|
Pink Eye is set in a small town in upstate New York, at a prison-like, dilapidated insane asylum where secret drug testing has gone inexplicably wrong. Patients are dying in sick and twisted ways and those who survive are becoming raging, homicidal lunatics. It's only a matter of time before all hell breaks loose and the patients begin to crave freedom to take their vengeance out on the world outside. When one patient does escape deformed, angry and far beyond insane, he brings death and terror to an unsuspecting town and everyone in it.
--IMDb
|
|
Review by Tristan
Added: January 30, 2009
Ever stumble across a picture online and say to yourself "Holy shit, I have to see this movie"? When you're a horror geek, this scenario accounts for at least 50% of the films you watch. You see a cool lookin' zombie, or a nice gory kill and you make it your personal goal to check this movie out. Such is the case with tonight's film. A week or so ago, I saw a picture online that just called out to me. After a little internet research I discovered two things. 1) Aside from that particular picture I saw, the movie looked pretty decent, and 2) I owned it. That's right folks, I actually own so many movies I don't even know what's in some of them. I figured it's time I start correcting this, and what better place to start than with the movie that had just recently caught my eye.
In a small New York asylum, the doctors' experimental drug testing has gotten a bit out of control. Patients are dying in dark and twisted ways, while the survivors go on to become suicidal and homicidal maniacs. To make matters worse, the orderlies are regularly tormenting and raping the female patients. There is one patient they won't go near though - the horribly disfigured Edgar (Joshua James). Edgar isn't his real name, but he quotes Edgar Allan Poe so much the nickname has kind of stuck. I find it interesting that he quotes Shakespeare almost as frequently but that was never under consideration. Anyway, as you might have guessed, Edgar is completely insane and manages to kill a couple of orderlies and break out to start his killing spree. As you also might have guessed, our leading lady (Melissa Bacelar) is kidnapped by the roving madman. With chances of escape looking bleak, her only hope is her boyfriend Brandon (writer Joshua Nelson) who vows to get her back.
Right off the bat, I'd like to address the level of gore in this movie. For this kind of budget, they must have had some pretty talented men working for them. This is some of the best gore I've seen in an independent feature in some time. This goes beyond the buckets-of-blood technique used by many independent filmmakers trying to establish themselves as a gorehound. The gore in this movie was very realistic and served its purpose. It's a rare day when a low budget film of this nature is able to "out-gore" its big budget brothers. Somehow, they pulled it off. There are quite a few scenes that will stand the tests of time in the gore department, one in particular being a very nasty eye gouging. Nothing kicks off a movie quite like a horrific gore spectacle. Another surprising element of this feature was the acting. I've almost grown accustomed to a sub-par acting standard due to seeing so many films of this nature, but this one actually thrived in that department. Joshua James did a fantastic job as Edgar the psychotic killer, and I wouldn't be surprised if he made the jump to some Hollywood roles in the near future. Melissa Bacelar again, even with her lack of screen time, turned in a very convincing performance. Not too bad on the eyes, either.
Starting off as a pretty generic man-in-the-mask slasher, Pink Eye is a perfect example of what happens when you promise to write your friends into your movie. A million characters are created with little to no back story and are either quickly killed or completely disappear. For awhile there it seemed like a new character was introduced every other scene with no more then 2-3 minutes of screen time. This is partially responsible for my other beef, the lack of Melissa Bacelar. Eye candy or not, you certainly can't cut out your main character for a better part of the movie with no explanation. I had a few other minor gripes with the movie, but they mainly revolved around generic plot holes and some cheesy "oh c'mon" moments. Every horror film is bound to have some, it's just the nature of the beast.
I unfortunately never saw James Tucker's last film Eat Your Heart Out (or Skinned Alive, depending who you talk to), but from what I've seen and heard, it's a lot of the same talented people working on both films. It features the same directing / writing team of James Tucker and Joshua Nelson respectively, and I don't imagine it's any less of a film than this. Some people just know how to work together and bring audiences a quality horror film. This is one of those pairs.
7.5/10.
|
|
Rate Movie? 
