Neville
Frightening Fanatic of Horrible Cinema
Karma: 142
Posts: 3050
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« on: June 07, 2004, 10:41:55 AM » |
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A quite pleasant surprise. After "Dagon" and this film gore prophet Stuart Gordon seems to be enlarging his views. This one is not even a supernatural horror movie, but rather a drama / thriller blend on how close anybody is to murder and violence.
The main character is a nobody. He lives in a small flat and works merely for a living. He is young but could easily be a middle aged person without perspectives. And them one day he is given a "job": to follow and later to murder an innocent person who has become a nuisance for his employer, a low-time mafioso. And our character decides to accept. You can almost hear him thinking: "OK, One killing. Only one. And I'll be granted everything I've ever wanted. I can live with this." Of course, this is only the begining.
Gordon seems to be interested, more than anybody could expect of him, in human nature and the reasons behind violence. This movie, which sometimes feels like horror and sometimes moves close to an indie drama, deals with these issues. It is a new territory for Gordon, and while some things work surprisingly well (the plot, tight and well paced, his camerawork) as a result of his tremendous experience with low budgets, others don't. There are a few moments where he can't resist the temptation of iserting "visions" which instead of broadening the views of the story, just blow all the tension from it. In other moments, the speeches of some characters are too self-explanatory.
However, Gordon seems to know his stuff well enough, and ultimately leaves the film as a victor. If his followers will be able to accept his departure from pure horror, well, that's another story. Personaly, I quite enjoyed the film, and found some of the key scenes adequately chilling.
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