Dan_Harkless

This movie is so bad in every way, it's not even worth going into. Although I'm a bad movie aficionado, I'd never make it through this one without RiffTrax's comedic commentary. With their riffs, it's worth watching once, but I won't be returning to this one.

The main reason I wanted to review the film was to let people know that there's a scene in a med school where a roomful of students dissect what appear to be real human corpses! (Flayed and contorted into disturbing poses, no less, apparently to make dissection access easier and/or to dehumanize them.)

There's no way this no-budget '70s turkey had the makeup / props budget for those to not have been real. I'm surprised none of the other reviews mentioned this, and I was surprised the RiffTrax guys didn't give their audience a trigger warning beforehand, and instead merely said stuff like "Wow!" during the scene. Since I don't watch snuff films, this is the most disturbing thing I've ever seen in a movie.

This film's cinematography and lighting are very good, and the shots are well-designed, for the most part (two glaring exceptions are an important scene with a "line-crossing" error, where two characters talking to each other from across the room are both looking off to the left, and another scene where a character is supposedly crawling up another character's leg from the floor, yet clearly the crawled-upon character is high up on a box). The set design, costumes (except for the awful matching "Spaceship Terror Film Crew 2010" sweatshirts on the two college guys, which I'm hoping was at the insistence of the director of both films, Harry Tchinski), and makeup are also all well done. Wendy Tchinski, the other half of HarWen Entertainment, did the set design and costumes, and was one of the non-SFX makeup artists.

Some of the actors were good. Gabrielle Urban probably turns in the scariest performance as Evil Little Girl. Norman Newkirk as James is a little reminiscent of Jack Palance, though more overtly evil, with more moustache-twirling, but if his performance is a little cartoonish, it's also consistent, creepy, and fun to watch. Finally, Stephen Lestat as the Grimises Demon (BTW, what a horrible name choice -- I can see why this got retitled -- I immediately thought of Grimace from the McDonald's commercials) was an unusual choice, but I think it was smart to go with a more schlubby guy rather than the usual handsome devil/demon. Also I liked the characterization, how he's quite polite and amiable, if you're cooperating with his will, and not the embodiment of all evil. The idea of a vampire demon was also a relatively unique choice. Simone Leorin is unremarkable but fine as Father Samuel, and I suppose his natural Italian accent helps sell him as a Catholic priest with the power to fight evil, though it occasionally gets in the way of his dialogue ("But what is its porpoise?"). The rest of the actors are about par for a low-budget indie film produced in a city like Tacoma, Washington that's not known for its film industry, and are generally mediocre to bad.

Harry Tchinski's writing is definitely not great, but the overall concept was good, and treated the subject of a "haunted attraction" concealing real-life horror with a lot more imagination than "Dark Ride" (2006). The thought of discovering you're complicit when you discover the horrific sights you've been enjoying are actually real people suffering is one that resonates for me, as a huge fan of haunted attractions. Also, as much as you hear about virgins being sacrificed, you very rarely hear anything about what consequences there are if your victim isn't actually a virgin, or how difficult it'd be to find adult virgins to sacrifice in today's day and age.

Probably the worst aspect of the movie was the sound design and foley, which the director credits himself for, the sound recording, and the sound mixing. The foley is laughably bad, and sometimes sounds like prerecorded sound effects being triggered (even the same footstep sound over and over) rather than actual foley. There's a huge noise floor under most of the dialogue and effects, which jarringly gets turned up before each of those sounds comes in and then gets turned back down after each one. Not sure if they recorded the sound on analog equipment, or just at way-too-low levels, or what. Sounds randomly sound weirdly tinny, are panned wrong, are out-of-sync with picture, etc. The dialogue is mostly easy to make out, though.

The only part of the sound that isn't bad is Eric Bridenmaker's music, which is very enjoyable, appropriate, and much better than the average film score. (Very synthy, but I like that.)

Vying for "worst" with the sound are the CGI effects, which again, the director decided to do himself, rather than finding some talented friend, as he was smart enough to do in cases like the cinematography and music. As with much of the foley, most of these effects are so bad that *anything* they could have put in instead (or even *nothing*) would have been better. The worst shot was a fully CG one of a restaurant and surroundings. It took me a long time to try to figure out what the shot was even supposed to represent (a model in the haunted attraction...??), and it was a real facepalm moment when I realized it was replacing what should have been a straightforward outdoor location shot. The best effect was done with puppeteering -- wish they had done more of the effects practically, as all the practical stuff in the movie (e.g. the special effects makeup) looked great. It's interesting that as of this writing (I'm about to submit an update), IMDb shows the film as still in post-production since June 2012 -- dunno if that's just an oversight on somebody's part, or if they had originally intended to have a proper effects company do the CG (and maybe have people who know how to do sound do that?) but ran out of money, and only finally finished off the film as a DIY last year.

If you're a fan of haunted attractions and enjoy low-budget indie horror and can forgive it its faults while enjoying the good stuff (which, depending on your tastes, may also include the female nudity liberally sprinkled throughout, and also one semi-shocking scene towards the end that I've never seen done in a horror movie before), this is an entertaining film which you'll probably enjoy, as I did. I would definitely be open to checking out more from Harry Tchinski in the future (though I'll feel dirty checking out his only other film to date, "Spaceship Terror", due to the glaring product placement in this film), but I hope he tries to stick to the directing and (visual) editing and delegates to people who are more talented at other aspects of production in the future.

Interesting -- looking at the user ratings as they stand now, this seems to be one of those love-it-or-hate-it movies with big spikes at 1 and 10 stars. Personally, I thought it was really great for what it was. What it was was quality ultra-low-budget indie horror/sci-fi. If it were me, I'd even add "/comedy" to that.

"Hanah's Gift" (note when searching that unusually, there's only one "n" in "Hannah" here) takes the overused horror film device of the "found footage POV camera" and instead makes it the POV of the title character's eyeballs, or other characters' eyeballs, when autistic Hanah uses her psychic powers to have an out-of-body experience where she temporarily does a ride-along in someone else's brain (accompanied by simple but very satisfying visual effects). This was years before the more high-profile "Hardcore Henry" did the first-person POV thing. The makers of "Hanah's Gift" did a very nice job of disguising the multiple takes they filmed this in as one seamless real-time 90-minute take, especially since they couldn't use the usual "dissolve across a camera whip-pan" trick, since we're seeing out of the eyes of a relatively catatonic little girl walking around rather than a camera that's being swung all over the place by an adult being chased by a monster/ghost/killer.

The dialogue was obviously semi-improvised (which is great for the realism of the first-person POV style), and not all the actors in this small independent production were equally up to the task. There are definitely one or two actors that may make you groan; my least favorite performance was unfortunately from the main antagonist, whose line deliveries sound like just that to me (though it is possible to buy it as just a really weird, possibly drug-addled affect), and who doesn't really sell her deranged mental state until the second half of the film, but the majority of the players are great. I kind of fell in love with (twentysomething) Victoria Mayers-Gray, who plays a hypercheerful teen with ADHD. She won the Rising Star Award at ShockerFest 2008 for this role, and she definitely deserved it. I found her portrayal of the unsinkable Toby to be as hilarious as it was adorable, and she's almost solely responsible for the "/comedy" I'd add to the genre list. I also really enjoyed Melanie Wise's naturalistic portrayal of a cynical suspended firefighter who fate wedges back into the role of badass heroine. (The main fight scene, choreographed by a stunt coordinator working under a pseudonym due to this probably being a non-union production, was particularly satisfying.) The score is by writer/director Zac Baldwin (who no, is not the fifth Baldwin brother they kept locked up in the basement), and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that one long talking scene is scored pretty badly -- a schmaltzy and meandering synthesized string solo that sounds like it's from "Ken Burns' Civil War" as directed by Roger Corman. I enjoyed the end-credits music, though, and other than those two instances, it didn't really register, so though I think Baldwin is a much better writer and director than a composer, that could've been worse.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that the mostly audio-only backstory rendition at the beginning of the film is one of the most effective film openings I've seen (even though the backstory didn't really end up being important to the plot in any way).

So, if you're a fan of non-studio productions and can forgive them their faults (the only glaring example of the low budget for me was the ski goggles they tried to pass off as next-generation night vision goggles), definitely check out this underrated little gem of a B-movie. I'm just sorry it's not available on DVD, and only (AFAIK) via Amazon Prime Video, as I'd love to own a future-proof copy of it. (Update: See Melanie Wise's reply to the copy of my review on Amazon -- she apparently has the only DVDs of the film in existence, and is willing to sell them.)