Deadline

This Canadian film is often sold as a horror film but it is actually a twisted drama. Stephen Young stars as Steven Lessey, a successful author and screenwriter who is having a bad case of writer's block. The works he has profited from don't satisfy him now and he is searching for "true horror" to write about. As the film progresses, his personal life begins to unravel alongside a series of hallucinations.

DEADLINE is a mixed bag. Its biggest flaw is that there are no likable characters in the film. Young's character is a jerk and his wife is just as bad. I couldn't care less what happens to these self centered people. Director Mario Azzopardi also makes sure to distance mainstream audiences by filling the scenes from Lessey's head with extremely graphic gore. It is well done but probably sends the audiences looking for a drama running. However, the film does make some interesting statements on the influence of violence in cinema and some of the hallucination scenes are truly haunting. Cindy Hinds, the young girl from Cronenberg's THE BROOD, co-stars as Lessey's daughter.

This weird Canadian quasi-horror film, about a writer of horror films whose life is falling apart at the height of his commercial success, is disjointed and crude in many respects. By accident, it winds up being pretty much exactly what the protagonist bemoans he's being forced by market pressure to create over and over again: A crass exercise in gory genre nonsense unimproved by much in the way of guiding intelligence, logic or ideas. Still, it's not at all your usual horror movie, and the ways in which it's bad are kind of interesting in themselves.

The dominant element in "Deadline" isn't its horror content (though there are plenty of scenes from the hero's fictional work arbitrarily tossed in, involving killer nuns, bloody shower deaths, et al.), but its shrill misanthropy. The protagonist isn't an especially sympathetic figure—he's often defensive, egotistical and rude—but the movie makes sure everyone around him is much worse. While he may neglect his children somewhat in his obsessive attention to work, his awful wife (who has no such commitments, unless apparent infidelity counts) neglects them out of sheer boredom and selfishness, then rails at him for being a bad parent. She's a one- dimensional shrew. Equally shrill and obnoxious are his producer, his new movie's prima-donna star, the students who criticize his work as worthless exploitation when he's given a university award (though he secretly knows they're right)…nearly everyone here is demanding, shallow and parasitical. Even his kids are directed to act in a sort of constant-tantrum mode, though admittedly we're meant to understand that this is the fault of bad parenting.

Of course eventually, after a tragic event, the writer hero snaps tether and can no longer distinguish beyond his imaginary horror and real life. This is supposed to be his mentally unhinged reaction against a world that continues to press him into ever-more-violent, disgusting, soulless (but lucrative) creations, insensitive to his disillusionment and trauma. Like everything else in "Deadline," however, this is handled in such an over-the-top, simplistic way it can't be taken seriously.

The film's writer-director Mario Azzopardi only made one feature (in his native Malta) before this, then went on to a very long, still-active mainstream career in (mostly) Canadian TV. Given that, it's hard not to see "Deadline" as a likely last gasp of artist-as-an-angry-young-man spleen. (He was just 30 when he made it, though for whatever reason the film wasn't released for another five years.) It's a fairly incoherent statement of that type, but it sure has a lot of rancor to vent. The earlier horror stuff is so pointedly gratuitous it's possible it's just there to create a commercially viable package. But the loathing directed at the film industry and at the hero's wife is so central here that one can only imagine Azzopardi had suffered some not-atypical embittering career setbacks and a very bitter divorce when he conceived this movie. No idea if that's true, but it's as good an explanation of "Deadline's" peculiar, vehement, watchably odd content as any. It's like a slicker, less grungy equivalent to Abel Ferrera's concurrent (in filming if not release) "The Driller Killer," which similarly poses as a horror movie but is mostly an expression of the filmmaker's griping that nobody appreciates a real artist, and how awful people are in general.

"Deadline" is an obscure, inventive, intriguing and occasionally very engrossing little Canadian-produced horror sleeper, but at the same time also difficult and even somewhat risky to recommend to fellow genre fanatics because it is certainly an awkward and downbeat movie. Basically a dysfunctional family drama and a portrait of downwards mental spiral, "Deadline" also boosts a whole lot of sickening and extra-gratuitous violence and I'm really not sure if people will appreciate this combination, let alone the robust and sudden changes in tone. Even though the gory bits undoubtedly form the best and most memorable part of the film, they clearly serve no purpose other than fill up space and attract wider audiences. Steven Lessey is a horror author whose previous scripts were hugely profitable blockbuster hits. So now, and obviously, Steven's producer nags around his head for a new script. But Steven wants to do something different and struggles with a writer's block. Being obsessed with this work, Steven doesn't notice how his wife becomes a frequent visitor of drug parties or how his neglected children play deadly games they've seen in daddy's movies. The sick & twisted horror fragments are either clips from Steven's supposed previous films (like a marvelous scene involving a black goat and an agricultural machine) or potential new concept for his new script. Particularly these fragments are outrageously demented and uncompromisingly shocking! Some of them really ought to be elaborated into a full-length horror movie, like the idea of suicidal fetuses and especially the idea of little children tying up and setting fire to their own grandmother. "Deadline" is pretty good but it could have been a lot better. In the hands of that other super-talented Canadian director David Cronenberg, for example, the processing of these themes and ambiances would have resulted in the ultimately petrifying cinematic nightmare. Still, writer/director Mario Azzopardi definitely didn't do a bad job. The atmosphere is admirably moody and the film is literally stuffed with unsettling imagery. "Deadline" is an interesting film, to say the least. Proceed at your own risk

Horror movies that reference their own genre have been more prevalent lately, but it seems they come attached with a certain degree of mordant comedy, signifying that the directors probably aren't completely convinced of their own convictions. But that's not really a problem with this film. DEADLINE is a horror picture that begins like any typical slasher film would, but later becomes more laid back in an effort to reflect on itself from an idealistic point of view. The film chiefly appears to be another examination of the effects of graphic violence in cinema on its viewers, particularly child viewers. The narrative framework for all this is built upon the story of a horror movie screenwriter whose life begins to disintegrate when he begins writing for more violent and more lowbrow productions than he'd prefer. As to be expected, it eventually leads to a collapse of his sanity.

I liked the film for its first two-thirds because director Azzapardi was trying to do something different and even attempting a resonant observation or two along the way. But like so many of these self-referential type films, it paints itself into a corner in the end to where it doesn't really have an ending. It rather just trails off in the final minutes, not knowing how to tie its various story threads. Nonetheless, its worth a look since much of it does hold some promise, at least before the third act.

Between an unfaithful wife, children who will not leave him alone and a producer who keeps reminding him of impending deadlines, penning a new script proves challenging for an esteemed horror screenwriter in this Canadian oddity. The editing design takes a bit of getting to used to with the film every so often cutting away from the on-screen action to horror episodes ranging from a blood shower to a woman burned by her grandchildren to an evil goat. As the movie progresses though, it becomes clear that these cutaways are reflective of his thought process and how he is constantly haunted by the things that he has written about, especially at a university conference where students tell him off for "peddling degenerate stuff". This leads to some fascinating discussions as the writer claims that horror is "a way of identifying with things that we might otherwise never identify with". Intriguing as 'Deadline' might sound, it is not the easiest film to warm to, unusual editing aside. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, especially not the arrogant lead actress in his most recent film and his selfish wife; he is not exactly a model parent either though, and it is at times hard to care what happens to him. The film is, however, quite encapsulating when focused on the horror ideas that haunt him, and what happens to his daughter late in the piece injects much food for thought.