Red Mist (Freakdog)

In FREAKDOG (aka: RED MIST) a group of med students decide to mix narcotics and alcohol for a night of utter blotto-ness. Unfortunately, their shenanigans are witnessed by Kevin who records their antics on his cellphone.

Not wanting their future careers ruined, the quick-thinking students decide to get Kevin wasted so they can destroy the evidence. Things don't go exactly as planned.

If you enjoy paranormal horror-revenge movies with possession and lots of gory deaths, then this will take you to Nirvana! There's even some mad science tossed in for extra joy!

This film gets bonus points for originality and its novel approach...

Or is it "Dog Standard"? ;o) Just kidding, I'm not spoiling anything, by saying the movie doesn't involve a dog (as in an animal). It's a "nickname". The movie is more or less what you would expect it is (with one or two exceptions). The gore is OK, the story has been told in similar fashion many times and the acting is OK.

The craziest thing was a warning before the movie started. For anyone who might be epileptic, there are scenes in here, that will trigger epilepsy (I don't know if there is any other more political correct way to say that, but I guess you get my point). The movie was screened at Fright Fest and the reaction of most of the crowd was less than enthusiastic (some even said, that it was as "bad" as Shrooms ... since I haven't yet seen that one, I can't comment on that though)

Irish film-maker Paddy Breathnach bored me to tears with the asinine drivel that was Shrooms, but being the reasonable fellow that I am, I was willing to give the guy a second chance at impressing me with his next movie, Red Mist AKA Freakdog (the fact that the back of the DVD showed hottie Arielle Kebbel in her undies had nothing to do with my decision—Scout's honour!).

Although this film isn't as soporific as Breathnach's earlier fungi-flavoured flop, at least delivering a few reasonable performances, it's still an ultimately unimpressive effort, with a derivative narrative that borrows heavily from several other horrors (most notably 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' and 'Patrick'), a thoroughly unlikable group of extremely clichéd characters, and a surprising lack of gore given the nasty ways in which the characters meet their fates (a juicy knife-in-the-throat aside, Breathnach misses every opportunity to really gross out his audience).

Oh, and the 'Kebbel in her scanties' scene lasts for all of 10 seconds... grrrrr!

It always strikes me as quite remarkable that med students in horror films are even dumber than the average adolescent horror movie characters. I mean, these people are supposed to represent our doctors and scientists of tomorrow, yet when confronted with a potentially perilous situation, they take the absolute worst decisions of all. Basically speaking, "Red Mist" is another umpteenth variation on the 'I know what you did last Summer' slasher theme. In other words, a bunch of young people do something incredibly stupid that results in the death of an innocent person, but in order to save their own careers/reputations, the make a pact to keep it secret. The events naturally come back to haunt them. The culprits who were immediately prepared to ditch the dead guy usually die first and most painfully. The sole member of the group with a bit of a conscious, usually the one who insists at first on calling the police, still has a slight chance of survival. Nothing new or innovative there, as "Red Mist" revolves on a band of dim-witted med students that go out partying with drugs that they have stolen from the hospital pharmacy and cause for the mentally retarded morgue assistant Kenneth to OD into an epileptic attack and subsequently a coma. The whole group is perfectly happy with Kenneth's "permanent vegetative state", as this prevents him from talking about what really happened, but the celestial Catherine is overrun by feelings of guilt and remorse. To help poor Kenneth and bring him out of the coma, she secretly experiments upon him with a new type of drug. The treatment doesn't have the wanted effect, however, as it causes "out of the body" episodes during which Kenneth possess the bodies of random people and uses them to extract revenge on those who wronged him! Indeed, what we're dealing with here is a genuine amalgamation of "I Know what you did last Summer" and the obscure Aussie shocker "Patrick". The plot isn't very original, but even more troublesome is that "Red Mist" doesn't distinguish itself from the overload of contemporary horror films in terms of gore, atmosphere or suspense, neither. The film is dull and slow-paced, with unmemorable murders and clichéd situations. The attempts to bring additional depth and plot twists are well-intended but completely miss their effect (like the scene where Catherine suddenly awakes in a body bag in the middle of the woods) due to the overall predictability of the concept. The acting performances are decent, especially from Arielle Kebbel and Andrew Lee Potts, but these freshly faced twenty-something hunks and babes seriously don't look like future doctors or surgeons. This film is a slight improvement over "Shrooms" for director Paddy Breatnach, as that film was completely incoherent and messy, but it still isn't solid horror like it ought to be.

After inadvertently putting a young man into a coma, a doctor tries to resuscitate him with a powerful new drug being tested at the hospital only for his murderous spirit to possess passers-by and kill them one-by-one for putting him there.

This one managed to be quite enjoyable even if nothing really sticks out afterward. The fact that this is based so much on a familiar, over-done plot-point of having the perpetrator seek revenge by body-hopping from one person to another going after the ones who placed him there is a tired, overdone cliché that really seems quite ludicrous the way it's presented here as being done through the tell-tale sign of a bloody nose after-the-fact, which manages to feel quite lame and ludicrous as yo be the overall source of the possession it really feels quite shorthanded. Though it does manage to have a rather credible back-story in the attempt to tie it in with the out-of-body experience from the experimental drug treatment, the fact that it's never explicitly stated how it's possible to do that makes for a really lame-duck explanation. As well, there's very little thought put into the film's final twist in terms of connecting it to explaining how the various crimes were committed, as this one manages to attempt something interesting in the final minutes only to undermine everything that's happened beforehand with the story to wrap everything up in how it played out, so in the end re-writes itself out of it's original storyline and produces a huge gap in logic rather easily. That said, there's still some good stuff here in the brutal deaths doled out which are quite fun and enjoyable in how shocking and nasty they get, as well as the concept of how it does these acts come about. Though it goes for mere shock value instead of playing about with suspense in these cases, it does work on the brutality stakes more than the actual scare factor. As well, the final matter of dealing with the body is quite ingenious and really unique, looking for a new way to actually deal with the threat that's never been done before and manage to work itself into the story rather nicely, in spite of the problems it perceived into the storyline. These made the film watchable and enjoyable, but it does have a few problems.

Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, Brief Nudity and heavy drug use.