Dark Feed

"Did you see that!?" A film crew shooting a low budget horror movie moves into a abandoned psychiatric hospital. The hospital seems to take on a life of it's own the longer the crew stays. Little be little the cast and crew begin to notice strange things happening. I will admit that I had pretty low expectations for this even though I did like The Ward. I also realize the movie is about a low budget film crew but just because that's the plot doesn't mean they only have to hire bad actors. Not only is the fake movie low budget and bad acting, the actual movie is low budget and bad acting. It's hard to knock the movie based on budget but there comes a point where you have to realize that acting does matter, even in really low budget throw away movies like this. The rest of the movie was pretty much cookie cutter and not that scary to me. If you are a hardcore horror fan you may like this, I did not. Overall, the bad acting was too distracting for me to fully get into the movie. I say D+.

The story revolves around a film crew who enters an abandoned psychiatric hospital to shoot a horror film and get more than they bargained for. I get a feeling that the Rasmussen brothers have a "thing" for old, abandoned psych wards which is lucky for us viewers!

Dark Feed was shot in New England using some of the same buildings featured in Shutter Island and Roger Danchik, art director on Session 9 was in charge of production design for the film. Dark Feed also features a haunting original score by award winning composer John Kusiak who scored Errol Morris's recent film Tabloid. The makings of a garishly good time and film are all there!

DARK FEED is yet ANOTHER film set in an abandoned old psychiatric hospital with a disturbing past. The characters of the storyline are a group of film-makers shooting a low budget horror flick (hooray for self-referencing) who soon find themselves menaced by something much more real and disturbing. As the tagline went...who will survive and what will be left of them?

The answer is not a lot, not that you'll care as this is strictly ordinary horror fare for the masses. DARK FEED is the kind of film that low budget filmmakers love to make, because it doesn't take a whole lot of effort or imagination or indeed talent on the part of the crew. The acting here is resolutely poor, the special effects limited, and the plotting almost non-existent.

What we're left with are a handful of loosely connected scare and kill scenes, some of which are pretty gory by genre standards. In the film's favour, it does manage to summon up a couple of relatively intense and frightening scenes, like the hands coming out of the wall, but these tend to be loss in a jumble of the merely ordinary.

Dark Feed is one of those films that looks cool, so you keep watching because something amazing is going to happen, you can feel it… So you keep watching and waiting… and waiting… Until the movie is over and you're like, "Damn, where did the past hour and a half go?" Dark feed had all the cool lighting, sweet sounds, awesome camera angles and shots of a horror movie, but with no movie. I really wanted to like it, but it really had no story and really weak dialog. It almost felt like a reality show a times, where you're just watching people on a film set work and talk about everyday life. The last 20 minutes of the film started to get interesting but I also felt like it didn't really matter because 70 minutes before that made my brain shutdown. A very bleak horror film overall, but it had major potential to be something amazing… Unfortunately it fell flat instead. I gave it a 4 instead of a 3 because the last 20 was pretty decent.

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A screenwriter visits the set of his horror movie in an abandoned psychiatric hospital, where a dark force begins to create its own drama.

Ouch! I gave this a shot because of some good recent IMDb reviews and the writer/directors also wrote The Ward, a passable hospital horror. Problem starts with the screenplay, which trowels on 20 different characters who get lost in a series of choppy, ineffective scenes. Most of the dialogue is pointless, failing to give impetus to the dark force, and the threat is confusingly both internal and external as ghouls creep out of the shadows and the cast goes insane. Plus they chose a really lame protagonist. Total mess and very hard to sit through despite the short run time.

On top of that is the damn music. It's mostly simple, eerie strings and plinky piano - but it never turns off. Even when the odd dramatic scene comes along the dialogue gets swamped, and the music completely drains other scenes of their creepiness when silence is needed. Very close to hitting the eject button.

Hard to judge the actors, because their characters were so badly drawn - a bunch of squabbling 13 year olds - and their lines were so pointless and lacking in intelligence or information.

Camera was also poor. Lots of reflection on the lens and bad lighting of the actors.

The story did develop pace in the end, but overall just awful. A much better film in this genre is Grave Encounters.