While doing work for a horror forum I'm apart of, I came across this by Michael J Murphy (who ASlashAbove dubbed the "Ted V Mikels of the UK"). Curious, I tried looking for any information I could on this, and constantly came up short; only being able to find stills or very short clips of the various death scenes.
To sum up the plot briefly; "Horror director Alistair Bailey is fired by VHS distributor William King. He believes that his film has been trashed but soon discovers that King tricked him and is planning to globally sell the movie. Bailey decides to don the same disguise as the one used by the antagonist in his film and make a new feature. Only this time the effects will be real!" On paper, the idea isn't too bad. It's the execution that killed it. The characters are fairly bland, and I forgot more than half their names up until the last twenty or so minutes of the movie--though how much of this is due to the writing or the already cheap-ish acting is anyone's guess.
As the protagonist; Alister never really won me over emotionally, or got me to take pity or sympathy on him. His situation was cruddy, sure. But he never got me to root for him when he sought revenge on those who wronged him. The same is also true for the antagonist, William. He was somewhat sleazy, but didn't do anything to make me truly dislike him--since I never got enough from Alister to really care. And in the middle we have Nikki, one of William's employees who takes pity on Alister and one of the main focus points in the movie. She's by far the more...suspect of the characters, and is sketchy at best with her intentions and may or may not be full of plot holes which will make things more difficult later.
The technical aspects are just okay at best. It's not terrible by any means, but not too great either. I would say it's similar to "555" if I had to be honest. The visuals are far more pleasant than the audio, which can kick in and out; going from being alright to sounding muffled or that they're far away (however, this could be due to the quality of the version of the movie that I found online).
The effects, including the murders, are rather mediocre at best. And for a budget that was estimated to be around £400 (assuming inflation went up 2% a year, we're talking just a bit above £910 today in 2015), it shows. While the kills were creative and ambitious, which I'll give the movie credit for, quite a few of them felt really cheap and were badly fake to where it was slightly cringe-worthy.
The most damning thing about the movie is the runtime, which is 76 minutes. This wouldn't be too bad if it wasn't for one thing, which is that a good portion of the movie is nothing but clips of what I believe are Alister's other movies or his dream sequences which don't move the plot or story further; making it feel like something out of "Sledgehammer", "Death Nurse", or even "Las Vegas Bloodbath" with how much pointless filler there is to push the story along.
How would I rate this on a scale from 1-10? I have to give it a 3. It's not an awful movie, but it's certainly really dry and flat. It's one of those movies where you see it once and sure you don't watch it again after that, barely being fitting enough to be considered a "popcorn flick". Murphy sought to make a commentary about the film industry, and it blew up in his face, as no distributor wanted anything to do with it. Irony much?
3//10
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