After Dark Horror Fest
8 Films to Die For
(Lionsgate Region 1 NTSC DVD)
(2005/2006)
review by Head Cheeze

I love film festivals. I’m blessed with a padded backside that allows for hours of uninterrupted cinematic bliss, and the After Dark Horror Fest/Lionsgate Eight Films to Die For festival seemed right up my alley. Sadly, the closest theater playing these films was nearly an hour’s drive away. Lucky for me, Lionsgate sent over seven of the eight films ( “The Abandoned”, which is still in theaters, will be coming out at a later date) during the same week I was suffering from a nasty bout of the flu, so, slathered in Vick’s and dosed up on Ny-Quil and Sudafed, I finally got my film festival.

I started with Mike Mendez’s “The Gravedancers”, as I was a huge fan of the The Convent, and had read a bit about this one in Fangoria awhile back. Dominic Purcell (Blade: Trinity/Prison Break) stars as Harris McKay, a lawyer who joins his friends in a night of drunken mourning at the local cemetery where their recently deceased friend is interred. After a lot of champagne and angst-ridden conversation, the three friends dance upon the graves of a trio of vengeful spirits who, in accordance with a poem called “The Gravedancer’s Lament”, aim to kill our heroes lest they find a way to put the spirits to rest.

While much of film is played for laughs, Mendez offers up plenty of shocks, gore, and some truly creepy looking antagonists. The performances are a little on the stiff side and the script is full of groaners, but the focus here is on fun and scares, and The Gravedancers has an abundance of both.

After coughing up half of a lung into a wad of toilet paper, I watched “Unrest”, a truly creepy supernatural horror flick set in a medical school morgue where a group of young doctors are assigned the cadaver of a young woman to work on. When strange things begin to happen to members of her group, Alison (Britney Spears look-alike, Corri English) suspects that the dead woman is somehow responsible, and she and her fellow student Brian (Scot Davis) attempt to uncover the secret of the woman’s demise before it’s too late.

Unrest was shot in an actual morgue (using actual cadavers in some scenes), and this lends to the film’s creepy, claustrophobic atmosphere, helped along by director Jason Todd Ipson’s deliberate pacing and limited color palette. The only major gripe I had with this film is that the well-established sense of dread is frequently broken up by jokey dialogue and horror clichés of the “I’ll be right back” variety. I was also a bit let down by the film’s climax/solution as it felt rushed and was handled a bit to preciously for my liking. Despite all this Unrest managed to be one of the creepiest new horror flicks I’ve seen all year.

Sadly the same cannot be said of “Penny Dreadful”. Rachel Miner (Bully) shrieks her way through what looks and feels like a ninety minute episode of Tales from the Crypt. Miner plays Penny Dearborn, a woman who lost her parents in a car accident when she was a little girl and suffers from a near-paralyzing fear of automobiles. Penny’s therapist (Mimi Rogers) takes her on a road trip in hopes of conquering her phobias, but when they cross paths with a mysterious hitchhiker, Penny finds that her greatest fear could very well be her only salvation.

If the above synopsis sounds silly, it’s because it is. Penny Dreadful adds nothing to the genre save for sixty minutes to a story that could have been told in thirty by adding a bunch of peripheral characters whose soul purpose here is to offer Penny a glimmer of hope before being dispatched by the “escaped lunatic” hitchhiker (who lacks only a hook to make him a complete cliché). This is one of the most aptly named films in the history of the genre.

Speaking of clichés, the people behind “Dark Ride” offer up a bevy of them. We have the escaped lunatic, the spooky theme park ride, and the bus full of drugged-out, sex-crazed college kids en route to spring break (all broken down into neat stereotypes, including the hapless geek, the stoner, the free spirit, the hunk, etc.). The titular dark ride is an Atlantic City amusement park’s funhouse that was closed down several years earlier after a pair of twins was found gutted by the mutant son of the ride’s operator. The kids come across a brochure announcing the grand reopening of the ride, and decide to break in and spend the night in the place instead of coughing up the dough for a motel, unaware that the maniac responsible for the killings years earlier has escaped from the asylum and had the same idea.

While Dark Ride certainly looks nice, features a few interesting kills, and sports one of the better masks I’ve seen on a killer, I liked this movie better when it was called “The Funhouse” (I can hear Tobe Hooper’s lawyer counting the money as we speak). Oh, and don’t get me started on the Scooby Doo ending. Zoiks!

I’ve totally overdosed on Asian horror, so I was already a bit apprehensive about the next film, Takashi Shimizu’s “Reincarnation” (aka Rinne). While I’d rather eat a fistful of maggots than see another ghost with flowing black locks, I have to say that Reincarnation ain’t half bad. A horror movie is being shot at a hotel where a grisly mass murder occurred. The cast and crew are haunted by visions and dreams that reveal that they are all, in fact, the reincarnated victims of the murders, while the film’s starlet is the reincarnation of the killer.

Like a lot of Asian horror, Reincarnation is a slow moving tale filled with the sort of subtle scares that made this sub-genre such a refreshing change of pace (for awhile, anyway), and borrows heavily from flicks like “Ghost Story” and “The Shining. Still, Shimizu manages to wrangle out some healthy scares from a somewhat tired plot device, and the result is a fairly effective supernatural thriller with a funky and unexpected denouement.

When I read the synopsis of “Wicked Little Things” I detected a pattern emerging. This was yet another story of vengeful spirits – this time in the form of bloodthirsty zombies of child miners who perished in an accident decades earlier – leading me to believe that there is either a glut of supernatural films at the moment or that the programmers of the After Dark Horror Fest really like ghost stories. The good news is Wicked Little Things managed to mix in some solid performances (thanks to Lori Heuring) and characterization into an otherwise formulaic vengeful ghost story. Heuring plays Karen, a grieving widow who uproots her family and moves them to a remote Pennsylvania township where here late husband’s family owns a home that was willed to them. Karen’s older daughter Sarah makes friends with the local teenagers while young Emma makes a decidedly different sort of friend in the ghost of a young girl who died in the mining accident. As Karen learns more about the history of her house, the town, and the last surviving relative of the owners of the ill-fated mine, it becomes apparent that she and her daughters will not be safe until the child specters’ thirst for vengeance is satiated.

It could well have been the intoxicating effects of the Ny-Quil, but Wicked Little Things seemed to run a bit long for me. Still, I liked the dynamic between Heuring and her two young co-stars (Scout Taylor-Compton and Chloe Moretz), and found that they made for a believable family unit coping with a tragic loss. Oh, and the concept of children-as-zombies always gives me the willies. Kids are just creepy enough as it is, let alone living dead ones.

The last film of my personal After Dark Film Festival was “The Hamiltons”. Equal parts “Party of Five” and “Hannibal”, The Hamiltons tells the story of a group of siblings who have been moving around the country since the death of their parents. Tim, the oldest of the children, has taken on the role of head of the family, while younger brother Francis is something of an introvert who has an obvious issue with the way Tim is running the family. When Tim kidnaps a pair of teenage girls it becomes clear who the Hamiltons are and just what it is Francis is rebelling against.

The Hamiltons is the low budget entry of the group (or so it seems), and has the look and feel of a digital video flick, with manic edits, an over reliance on filters and camera effects, and a somewhat flat aesthetic quality. Luckily, the film’s visual shortcomings are made up for by a dark and absorbing story, a smart script, and solid performances. This one may take fans of the other films in this series by surprise, though, as it is a virtually bloodless affair. The lack of gore didn’t bother me, though, as the story of this family is creepy enough without it.

Lionsgate offers each of these films separately, but a boxed set was announced and I’m assuming will be available when The Abandoned is ready for release. In any event, each film sports bonus features, including commentary tracks on each, as well as featurettes and other goodies.

From what I understand, the After Dark Horror Fest is destined to be an annual event, which is great news for horror fans. While the 2006 entries were something of a mixed bag (and I say that without actually seeing all of them), I found four of the six films that I did see to be better than average offerings, and look forward to seeing what they come up with next.