Deadline

What a curious and weird Canadian production this turned out to be. About a horror screenwriter on a slow descent into depravity while trying to come up with his next screenplay, all this under pressure of his producer. There isn't much of a story present to carry the film, but other things manage to do this. First off, there are plenty of scenes portraying the kind of fiction our writer writes about. We're talking some graphic scenes of gore & bloodshed here, so be prepared for that. Then it seems this film tries to raise some issues about these topics. Like why write about such extremities? Like a producer that's only interested in having his screenwriter deliver what sells: sex & violence. Soon our writer can't get another coherent scene on paper anymore, and his mind starts deteriorating accordingly. His cynical wife isn't of much help. He starts having violent outbursts. His kids get scared. Then comes alcohol, drugs, women. Not sure what to think of this film, as it all seems so pointless in the end. But it was, uhm, an interesting watch.

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.

"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

Make no mistake this is a good horror film. It has some nice chills, good amount of gore and some disturbing moments that will be with you after the film has ended. But Azzopardi has attempted not just the usual horror flick here; he has fashioned an allegorical gem based on the debate over violence in the media using a horror writer and his family as the focus. Azzopardi has also crafted a post modern film which is self-commenting, non-linear, and offers no definitive resolution for all of his characters which can tend to instill an unsatisfying or muddled ending. However, this film should be viewed as ahead of its time in its treatment of the subject matter and original way of presenting it. The style of the film owes much more to the Italian horror masters (Argento, Fulci, etc.) than it does to North American cinema as Azzopardi, made his mark in Canadian cinema. It should also be noted that while the film is allegory, it was apparent to me that Stephen King was the basis for the main character (even his name is Stephen) and pre-dates any self-referential treatment (The Dark Half) from King by almost a decade. In this regard, the film remains highly original in theme and still well worth watching. Bottom Line: good horror film that will evoke Italian cinema but you must be willing to put the pieces together on your own...a thinking person's horror film.

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.