Suspended Animation

For a video nasty this was surprisingly watchable. The choice to examine the obsession with evil in the 2nd act of the film gave it a depth that few horror/thrillers in the low budget genre ever truly achieve.

The basic plot is that a movie director is drugged and kidnapped by a pair of crazy cannibalistic sisters while he is on a snowmobiling holiday. Although he escapes, his brush with this evil leaves him obsessing with understanding what would make these women, particularly the dominant sister, Vanessa, become so twisted and warped.

His investigation leads him to find Vanessa's daughter, Clara, a struggling actress with an abusive teenage son.

The film doesn't revert to pointless gore but instead gives a thoughtful exploration of the quality of evil, beautifully examining the seeds of a serial killer and examining the idea of nature or nurture motivations. For the discerning viewer who doesn't just want a basic horror shocker, this film delivers some interesting ideas despite a few production and script flaws which can be attributed to small budget rather than small talents.

Interesting movie, but I don't feel it was casted well. The movie seems influenced by Misery, but the cannibal sisters are nowhere near as convincing as Kathy Bates. There is another actor in this movie who plays the grandson of one of the cannibal sisters, and is a budding serial killer. The actor is almost laughable at his attempt to portray a young psycho, I believe he was from the Disney channel originally.

Overall, besides these faults, the movie is disturbing at times & is worth a watch. Maybe I'm just desensitized, this probably could horrify some folks out there. I'm interested to read the novel that the movie is based off of, it at least piqued my interest that much.

I could not sleep so I turned on the TV and this seemed to be the only movie that got my attention, at first, it seems that the movie will end after few torture scenes or what so ever but there are huge twists in the history that makes this film remarkably good besides not having an unique history it does make itself unique.

There are some actual stuff related to cannibalism such as it being heriditary and other sick stuff, the movie explores some bit of it but I didn't like so much how they introduced and put the history together, there seemed to lack an excuse to the main character be there and doing what he was actually doing.

Despite it's bad reviews, it's a worthy and interesting movie to watch and it develops very well along the theme.

What struck me was the remarkable similarity of Fred McArthur-who played animator Tom Kempton-to Gene Kelly both in looks and voice. Its a typical film of today's horror genre where everything is thrown in and you get the impression they never knew how to end it. The cannibal theme was quite interesting but rather pointless as we only saw a pair of women who talked about it.Kemton,by this time tied to a wheelchair and pleading to be set free,suddenly found himself minus a finger as one of the mad sisters chopped it off.Later when he was rescued by his snowmmobiling buddies who'd gone ahead of him,the finger was "reattached" with sticking plaster though you had to assume he later went to a hospital. Placing Kempton there in the first place was the stock plot of going to the house for help after he crashed his machine Here though is where the story began to go haywire as the animator makes a film based on the mad sisters-he'd previously promised to put them in the movies if they let him go!! Next up comes a meeting with a woman who turns out to be the adopted daughter of the youngest sister-she agrees to be a model for Kempton's next production.She in turn has a son who gives insanity a bad meaning and hes suspected of being a serial killer when Kempton discovers a pile of rings presumably trophies kept from his victims. Its not really that frightening when you think of what happens in real life but if you watch this movie don't blink too much or you may lose the plot! The ending was the kind thats been used over and over again-the villains are presumably killed but still keep coming back.we have the landrover which gets bogged down in the mud-as a variation to being unable to start-and you think no way would Gene Kelly have played in a film like this-he would probably have found it difficult keeping up with the plot!

With little knowledge or context, I was happily surprised by this film! It's thoroughly engaging, and I would agree with some other reviewers in that this film is fairly effective exceeding expectation and throwing in a good handful of unexpected twists & turns. Some of the negative reviews are surprising and seem quite ridiculous as this is flagrantly far from being the worst film ever made. Obviously it's not high high art, but that clearly isn't the intention. If ultimately you want something that entertains and engages, which seems to my problem as of late (in that entertainment isn't that entertaining these days)! This is a well done thriller. Enjoy!