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A major horror
movie fan gets a small part in a B-movie
only to discover that there's a backside to Hollywood.
People are backstabbing each other everyday - literarily.
Someone is killing the cast of the B-movie off one
by one and it all seems to be connected to a murder
that occurred almost 50 years ago.
IMDb lists this as being 108 minutes long. Guess what?
They're not kidding! It's an almost 2-hour long low
budget slasher flick with a very low body count and
a very slow pace. Investigating further on IMDb I find
out that it's actually not a low-budget horror flick
with a budget of $500,000. It's budget was in fact
5 MILLION dollars. Wait, what? 5 million? That is at
least one zero too many to be believable. Anyway,
Dark Reel has got something that has become
increasingly popular in horror movies recently - it's
got a supernatural subplot. One that could've easily
been removed - if only to shorten the ridiculous
running time. 110 minutes is just too much. I can
barely handle high budget horror movies that are that
long - but a low-budget one with washed up actors?
What have I done to deserve this?
The movie revolves around Adam Waltz, a B-movie fan
who's just won a small part in a cheesy pirate
movie. He quickly befriends the star of the movie,
Cassie Blue - a Hollywood scream-queen. It seems as
if things are really looking up for Adam but when
the cast is slowly killed off one by one by a masked
killer, Adam's luck changes for the worse. Will he
be able to stop the killer before he or Cassie gets
to be next on the chopping block? This is a really
tame slasher I've got to tell you. The real slashing
doesn't even start until the final 10 minutes or so,
before that we just get two murders (excluding the
one in black and white in the cheesy opening scene).
That leaves us with almost 100 minutes of nothing
but bad dialogues, embarrassing acting and a chockingly
poor story. Who the hell financed this anyway?
I keep complaining about the bad acting but there are
some big names to be found in here - the problem is
that none of the actors seem to be taking this project
very seriously. It's a cash-job and I'm betting that
most of the budget went to hiring these C-grade actors.
Lance Henriksen has a rather small part but is the
one who gives us the most convincing performance. Washed
up actor Edward Furlong looks like a hot mess and is
no longer the good actor that he once was. Tiffany
Shepis does a decent job, but again, you could tell
that she wasn't really into this project. Tony Todd
also feels gravely miscast as a cop. Finally, the
biggest mistake of them all, the very talented and
beautiful Alexandra Holden gets stuck with the worst
role of them all - and while she does an okay job,
this girl certainly deserves better than this.
Directing-wise this won't impress anyone. It looks
like any other DTV horror flick really, that isn't
studio-produced. There's no atmosphere or suspense
to be found but I think the absolute worst part about
this movie was the soundtrack. My god this was a
dreadful soundtrack. I felt like jamming a freaking
corkscrew into my ear just to stop the sombre and
poorly-composed soundtrack that felt so misplaced.
With a better soundtrack, a re-edit (how about chopping
it down to a more appropriate 75 minutes?) and some
more work on the colour scheme, Dark Reel could probably
be pretty good but as it is now, this is pretty damn
bad. It's so boring and gloomy and cheesy that it
doesn't succeed in any department as a horror flick.
We get a slit throat, disembowelled body parts, an arm
chopped off and some more.
Terrible. Simply terrible.
Pretty awful slasher movie that does have some
potential but is ruined by... well, many aspects
really. I wouldn't recommend it but if anyone re-cuts
this and changes the soundtrack completely, I'm willing
to give it another watch.
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