Long Time Dead

STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All Costs

Set and shot in Britain,LTD would be pretty indistinguishable from being shot in Hollywood.It's a horror thriller about a oujia board that works thanks to some nifty camera work,a jolty score and some rather grisly effects.And all at a running time of just an hour and a half.This is overall an intriguing and original premise,and while maybe not as delivering as it could have been,should be checked out,maybe with the aid of a speaker sound system.***

A random group of young adults who are some combination of roommates/friends takes time out from their busy partying schedule to play with an improvised Ouija board, when they accidentally call forth a djinn who tells them that they will all die.

Long Time Dead is quite a mess, made all the more frustrating by occasional flashes of competence. It couldn't have helped that that a veritable army of writers--seven credited in all--worked on the story and script, including director Marcus Adams.

After a brief prologue set in the late 1970s in Morocco which was far more promising than most of the film proper, we begin meeting our bloated cast of heroes. There are eight of them, maybe all living in the same building or apartment, except for Lucy (Marsha Thomason), who appears to be living on a boat near the building. If I sound unsure, it's because Adams is not able to clearly establish the characters, their relationships to one another, or the relationships of one location to another. It doesn't help that a few of the five males look alike, and they all dress alike. Neither does it help that as the film progresses, various characters arbitrarily appear and disappear for random lengths of time. That fact is indicative of the pacing problems that plague the film on many levels.

It's not often very clear why any characters are doing whatever they happen to be doing at a given moment. Most of the plot seems like an excuse to put characters in very stereotypical horror/thriller scenarios, where they slowly walk around an environment frightened, becoming startled in various ways until finally some unseen thing kills them. These scenes are often competent, and occasionally they're good, but in the context of the film, they have little dramatic impact. Much of Long Time Dead plays more like a sample reel of "scare scenes"; it has little coherency as a story.

A big problem is that the chief villain is never clearly shown, explained or given any rules to follow. For most of the film, the villain is invisible. Invisible villains are usually a problem, and often indicate deficiencies in budget and/or imagination. Oddly, by the end, there is a concrete villain and the film has devolved into a fairly stock thriller, where we have to guess whom the possessed cast member is.

Although the story has promise, and the ending is somewhat of an improvement, even though it never rises above the cliché, Long Time Dead is too burdened with severe flaws in direction, cinematography (the film is frequently far too dark) and performances to merit a recommendation. I ended up granting a 4 (equivalent to a "high F" letter grade) because of the adequacy of some of the "scare" and death scenes, the good ideas in the backstory, and the slightly more engaging climax. The film would have been much better if the prologue and the subsequent events with Becker and the one character's father who ended up in a mental institution had been the focus, but alas, it was not to be. Let's hope Adams fares better the next time around.

Synopsis : After a night filled with dancing, drugs and drinking, a group of British students decide to gather around a Ouija board to see what happens. After breaking the circle early, they summon DJINN, a fire demon and one by one they begin to disappear. What will they be able to do to stop the Djinn?

Overview : A pretty decent movie for being direct to video.

*Atmosphere : Definetly revolves around the club scene. I was starting to feel a bit old but paid no mind and waited for the killings! Big tip I got from this movie; don't mess with a Ouija board when you have been taking numerous drugs in one evening. *Pace : About average, not too slow, not too fast. Story progressed good.

*Cast/Characters : Fresh new faces from the London circuit, except for familiar face of Lucas Has. All grown up but still looks 12. Acting skills were good from everyone, I was shocked! *F/X : A bit campy for the movie (at least DURING the killing scenes) but the end result was definitely worth it. Gotta love a demon who kills with fire! *Story/Plot I am a sucker for a story that revolves around a Ouija board (because they freak me out) so I felt the story was really was done.

Jekyll's Thoughts : It was definitely a fun movie that ranks higher than most direct to video movies. It gets a decent 3 out of 5 star rating from me. If you see it at your video store, check it out.

The attempt to bring the ouija board theme to a movie sounds good idea, and the first 10 minutes are kind of scary. There was so much potentinal at the beginning of the movie, sadly it fails. The plot is nothing new, it couldn't scare even if taken seriously, the directing is good at some point, but as we can't see the "djinn" until the end we can't get scared in the death scenes. The good thing about the movie is the acting, and I could say the effective score. The ending is quite good that's all I can say about it.

"Long Time Dead" is recommended for recent fans of the horror genre, even though it failed to promote the horror genre of the new century. Watch it for some fun!

LONG TIME DEAD

Aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Sound format: Dolby Digital

During a Ouija session, several drunken teenagers summon a djinn which proceeds to kill them, one by one.

Though clearly influenced by American horror movies, LONG TIME DEAD finds an echo in Michael Armstrong's UK thriller THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR (1969), in which bored teenagers inadvertently sparked the wrath of a deadly killer - in Armstrong's film, the villain was an all-too-human maniac, whereas Marcus Adams' updated version unleashes the forces of supernatural terror on its hapless protagonists. Alec Newman (from the TV remake of DUNE) is the unofficial leader of the group, whose father (Michael Feast) was involved in similar jiggery-pokery many years earlier, leading to several deaths witnessed by Newman as a child.

The movie opened in UK theaters to scathing reviews and dismal box-office, and while the artless, multi-authored screenplay wanders aimlessly from scene to scene (the curse of so many modern horror films), it isn't nearly as bad as various reviews have suggested. Performances are uniformly fine (particularly Newman as the damaged young man forced to come to terms with his father's terrible legacy, and former soap star Joe Absolom as a potential victim), and Adams stages the various set-pieces with brisk precision, building to a fiery showdown between Newman and the unstoppable monster. The narrative makes little sense, but the movie is efficient and watchable, and amounts to passable popcorn entertainment, nothing more or less.