I remember seeing this film when I was a kid and I remembered that it scared the sleep out of me and surely tributed to my current horror fetish. But over the years it seems to have vanished from everybody's minds, into that vast oblivion where only Danish horror films can go. Anyway, imagine my thrill when I happened to find the film on a crappy VHS in a just as crappy local videostore. I got it, went home, let it lay there on the kitchen table until day fell into darkness and further into night. You might call this over-the-top expectations or something, but I was a bit frustrated when the credits had rolled.
"Sidste time" comes off extremely ambitious in one sense and I can't really understand what the negative criticism, dismissing the film as a "standard" or "routine" slasher, because I have NEVER seen a film like "Sidste time". It has a fundamental difference towards other films and the closest thing I can compare it to is the odd and mysterious tone of Lucio Fulci's old masterpiece "The Beyond". While I understand the criticism in itself, yes we suffer from some seriously lame characters carrying out some equally lame dialogs while getting killed off one by one (again), I have a hard time making sense out of the critics missing the weirdness of the film. Because it's in the fundamental weirdness that "Sidste time" collects it's points. The film does start out as a standard piece, but pretty soon you realize that we have no idea what's going on. As if in an episode of Twilight Zone, the characters find themselves stuck in a parallel dimension... or is it the sadistic, blood thirsty TV-show that is a demonizing illusion? Just how much power is contained within the dice of the very satanic Mickey Holm? Or is it just a ghost story? Or are the kids going mad? We don't know, all we can do is ask ourselves the same thing as the film's Augusta, "Why is everything so strange?" It's a heartache to understand what a sensation this film COULD have been. Because as long as the film rely on it's spooky atmosphere and the horrific notion that anything can happen in this pseudo school of horror, it's one of the most haunting slashers I've seen, and probably the best (or is it "the only GOOD"?) Scandinavian horror film ever produced. But quite often this excitement is ruined by your average stupid screenplay of characters spontaneously running away and other unlikely, moronic things. Not to mention what I've already mentioned, that is to say lame and predictable dialogs.
We have good actors, we have a nice dash against media exploitation and we have a sensational engine of suspense being expanded too often. If we had a screenplay that could make the different elements of the film work better together (as it is now, it does a worse job than the kids in the film) and crunch in unpredictable turns of terror, we would have a sensational masterpiece of horror. I never asked for a new "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or a fancy "Dawn of the Dead" with Ving Rhames. I'd donate MONEY, though, to see an understandable remake of "Sidste time". Because it could be marvelous.
PS Schmidt and Jürgensen should be given some credit though, since they were two Danes trying to wake the slasher genre to life a year before Wes Craven actually did it.
