Dark Feed

Film set in an old asylum where a low budget horror movie is being filmed. People get killed in gruesome fashion, this movie is pretty gory, but that's it. You could write the plot on the back of a postage stamp. Acting is reasonable, effects are not too bad. I bought this from my local Poundland store so can't really grumble, but I won't be watching it again

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.

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.

I am increasingly amazed that projects like "Dark Fall" and the people responsible for them somehow manage to get investors, and ultimately a distro house like Lionsgate to put it out.

This HAS to be a tax-write off scam, a "Spring Time For Hitler" scenario where the joke's on us, the viewers, and the IRS. No one viewing the rushes, or reading the script could not have missed the fact that this was SciFy Channel quality, low-rent drivel. Ergo, it had to be planned that way so investors could declare a loss on their income for 2012, thus taking the IRS bite and rendering it insignificant.

Everybody gets a REFUND!......a bunch of 20-somethings get a summer project, get stoned, drunk, have sex, all on the investors' dime, which will inevitably come right back to the investors' pockets. Also, how many times has that run-down hospital been used in films lately?

A film crew shooting a horror flick in an old abandoned hospital, realise that all is not what it seems as one by one, they all seem to fall under the influence of an evil presence...

The problem I had with this film is that it's nothing that any self respecting horror fan hasn't seen before. It takes a while to get going and utilizes done before clichés such as ominous music combined with slow tracking shots, in an attempt at atmosphere. As a result it emerges as a pretty lacklustre by the numbers effort that despite having one or two nice ideas, is simply a ho-hum affair that has no real suspense or tension and the characters are pretty uninteresting. The performances aren't great either and overall the film simply comes across as boring. It was also far too restrained for my liking, considering its premise could have allowed for at least some potentially entertaining set piece kills, but it's all to tame and cutaway.

4/10, just a dreary, dull horror for me.