Horror 2002 Elite Entertainment Official Website Buy It Now

Wow.  Naming your horror movie, Horror, is the act of a man with huge balls.  It is akin to naming your restaurant, "The Best Food You Will Ever Taste".  In both cases, you had seriously better deliver the goods.  Night of the Living Dead has two things: some nighttime and a whole bunch of the recently living dead.  Zombie had...well, zombies.  Suspiria (which means witch) was about witches, and any guesses as to what The Fog is all about?  You see...naming your film well is tantamount to making your film well.  You raise expectations and risk alienating your audience through what they will perceive as betrayal if the film doesn't live up to its name.  I believe Horror, interesting as it was...was misnamed.

Low budget filmmaking presents a director with an interesting problem.  You know ahead of time that you cannot achieve the results that you really want, because you simply cannot afford the process of making them happen.  So, do you attempt them anyway and take whatever results you can get; or do you just make another zombie movie and be done with it.  Director, Dante Tomaselli took the first path...despite its many risks.  But Tomaselli took it one step further.  Perhaps emboldened by the lavish praise from film festival audiences in regards to his first short film, "Desecration", Dante made bold moves in the name of surrealism to emulate that success a second time.  "Desecration" was a disjointed and atmospheric tale that was as much told with its visuals as it was with the script, and left most people saying, in the same sentence, words like: brilliant, imaginative, nightmarish, hallucinogenic, confusing, lost, jumbled.  As a first effort, it was done exceptionally well and managed to impress nearly everyone at all interested in the genre. 

With Horror, it would seem that Tomaselli thought to himself, "I have to live up to the expectations now!", and then proceeded to cloud up, what could (and perhaps should) have been a very straightforward film, by using mystique and a bizarre continuity.  In a recent Fangoria article, the director is quoted as saying, "With my films, ambiguity is the essence of the plot, and everything should be left open to interpretation. Each film should be an interior journey."  I was taught in film school that ambiguity is a shortcut past planning; a tool of the improviser, but it appears that Tomaselli really does work overtime to make things vague.  But even then, the addition of such things as an unexplained horde of zombies just comes off as "borrowed".  Dante could make one hell of a low-budget zombie film if he wasn't so concerned with making art and statements.

In Horror, five teenagers have escaped from drug rehab at the urging of a twisted reverend who after somehow managing to get inside the facility to talk with them, also managed to give them a bag filled to the brim with hallucinogenic shrooms and candy.  This combined with all the pot that they are smoking from their bounty of pot pipes (people get to keep some weird stuff in drug rehab these days), has them pretty torn up.  But they at least have the presence of mind to make the journey from the rehab facility to the reverend's Children-Of-The-Corn'ish house.  But once there, they discover more than they bargained for when they are thrown into the middle of a mystery.  The elderly reverend's son, and his wife, have been keeping their young daughter like a slave in the house with a mixture of brain-washing and drugging.  

Unfortunately, the tripping teens don't handle all this too well and end up killing the reverend's son and daughter team of evil...although they are still living later.  This may seem strange, but isn't entirely strange considering that the reverend himself has been dead for some time as well.  All that being said, there are some seriously diabolical things going on at this house.  Unfortunately, we are never let in on what those things might be...wouldn't want to derail the "interior journey" that Tomaselli talked about with explanations.

Since Tomaselli prides himself on his strange visuals more than anything else, for this film he had to script in the fact that nearly every character is on drugs (either voluntary or forced) just to explain away all the stuff he put onscreen.  Giant and menacing jack-o-lanterns, melting dolls, horrifically burned faces, slamming doors, a horde of zombies and one creepy goat with a bad habit of staring evilly at folks, are 

just a few of the things that will assault your senses.  But my senses were more assaulted by the fact that half the films characters disappear halfway through...

Speaking of characters, I think the smartest choice of this entire project was the casting of The Amazing Kreskin to play the aged reverend who controls his flock through mind control and sheer will.  In fact, Kreskin didn't have to act at all, since the scenes where he is forcing others to submit to his will are all adlibbed by himself.  Kreskin is already a pretty strange guy, and throwing him in a clergyman's outfit and surrounding him with what appears to be all the powers of hell, doesn't make him any less menacing.  There are some great extras of Kreskin using his "powers" on the cast of the film, and it is purported by the director that the scenes in which he uses his skills of mentalist to bend others to his will, were all taking place for real as the scenes were filmed.  Casting Kreskin was a great idea, but it weighs heavily like a move for the sake of cult status.  And speaking of cult status, look for a cameo performance by Felissa Rose.  Yes, THAT Felissa Rose, who is back in the genre after 15 years, since she played out the most surprise ending of all time in Sleepaway Camp.

Horror is a decent movie, with a wonderfully creepy soundtrack, but in no way, shape or form contains any real "horror".  A more apt title to the film would have been Confusion or ArtHouseTerror or MindBender or Wierd...but not Horror.  There is the same amount of genuine fear hear as could be expected from Man Servant Heccubus from Kids In The Hall.  What is here however is a visual FEAST, the likes of which you have not seen contained within one movie.  If you are one of those that visits an art gallery and stares deeply at each and every painting, studying its depths and meanings...even if it is just some randomly splattered paint, than Horror will be right up your alley!  On the same hand, if you spend time outside your local Starbucks discussing the relationship between zombie and victim, and how it represents a Biblical tale of the herded masses clawing for a taste of the host, and after having such, gaining life...than this may also be worthy of many a nights conversation.  But if you like your low-budgets drenched in blood and brains, and your movies entitled Horror to be a little scary at least, this is not your bag.

Dante Tomaselli's Horror is a lot like a David Lynch project.  Very strange.  Very disjointed.  Good, but not genius.  And weird, man...really weird.

-aaron-

 

Directed by: Rick Bota   Written By: Carl Dupre & Timothy Day   Based on Characters By: Clive Barker   Cast: Ashley Laurence Doug Bradley Dean Winters Ken Camroux William S. Taylor Trevor White

DVD Features: Widescreen Presentation Dolby Digital Sound Deleted Scenes With Commentary Audio Commentary With Director Rick Bota Visual Effects Walkthrough With Jamison Goei