shaun-pegg

A grad student finds an ancient, possibly cursed one-act play called "Katernica," and five theater-types go through auditions and live births which may or not actually be related plays. A talky and highly experimental work set in the theater world, it has smart moments but will lose most audiences early on; it does end on a pretty psychedelic trip, though.

British feature from director/producer/co-writer/co-editor James Edward Newton (BLACK LIZARD TALES,LIBRA) that has a literally evil play director(Tony Mardon (SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME, BEYOND FURY, THE WITCHES OF THE SANDS) who uses two sisters (Fran St. Clair (HAPPY-GRADUATION,SCARLET (2024) Annabella Rich (VIDEO SHOP TALES OF TERROR, ACTING, I CURSE THIS LAND) and a sole actress (Anna Fraser (SIX YEARS GONE,TRUTH SERUM) who all fall under his powers to perform the title play while gory killings occur throughout the theater.

There are a lot of indie horror people in this and behind this and none of them were able to save it because it's pretty much a mess. It starts out kind of promising with Karen karening all over the place, but the actress who plays her seems to be doing a lot of ad libbing and it's uh, not great. It's inexplicably 104 minutes long and draaagggggggssssss in so many places.

The last 15 minutes are half of the movies 58 producers each given a couple of lines to say in a "breaking news" alert that is tacked on just to give them a part in the movie for the money they contributed lol and then after that it just drops the news reel and has the rest of them saying bizarre things that seem like inside jokes nobody gets until it finally ends.

Still, James Duval can get it and Dawna Lee Heising is in this way too briefly and I'll watch anything she's in a hundred times but it actually works against the movie here because as soon as we saw her, Taylor and I both agreed she should have played Karen. Now that would have been the 5 star gold I wanted!

This isn't a bad film, but there are problems with this that drags it down. I would say the acting is above average, the editing was somewhat okay'ish, and the music was mediocre. But I would recommend this to my friends, and my mother. Fans of horror wouldn't mind watching this.