Reviews
OK. Everyone in the room put your hand up if you’ve seen a horror film before. Now, keep your hands up if every one of those films has managed to scare you in even the slightest way possible. Be it, psychological, gruesome, theoretical, simply a JUMP!, or any one of a thousand other ways. Those of you who still have your hand up you’re liars! Even Shrek 2 scared me a little (I was scared by the prospect of having wasted £6 on the truly shit spewing brand of hell it offered). You’re all liars, and may you burn in that special area of hell reserved for the insanely evil. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Fritzl, and Steve McClaren, you’ll be playing doubles with Hitler’s remaining ball. Unless of course, you’ve seen Red Mist (Freakdog to use its American title (to know this somehow makes it even worse).
It’s quite blatantly a horror film, there are deaths, (attempted) JUMPs!, blood, gore, and all that. One of the deaths is actually reasonably cool (for 30seconds). But it doesn’t scare you, you don’t look away, nor even behind your hands. ‘Cool’ is not scary.
Like any film genre, the ‘Horror’ goes up and down in popularity (by popularity I mean with producers, studios and distributors). The past 5 years, they’ve gone through a bit of a lull, at least in Hollywood. You ask me to think of recent horrors, all I can give you are either Brit-made yet US funded flicks such as The Decent, Shrooms and 28 Weeks Later, or Japanese horror/thrillers, all seemingly involving a young girl with long black greasy hair and a filthy white nightdress in desperate need of a brush and a shower. Apart from the American Japanese remakes, all of which seem to ignite the same level of fear as a fluffy bunny (providing you don’t have leporiphobia), the only slightly better than shit horror I can think of is Saw, and even then, only Saw and Saw II are really watchable.
Red Mist is kind of a British film (Directed by Paddy Breathnach who’s technically Irish but that counts as British in film-terms). Yet is set in the US, with American actors and American stupidity. Breathnach’s last film was Shrooms, this time set in Ireland, through The Irish Film Board and The Northern Irish Film Commission. But still American actors and no doubt American money. Sadly the poster (an image of a skull being produced by a hole in a forest tree-scape, along with a few funny mushrooms) was the best thing about the whole film. Once you’ve bought the DVD and seen the cover, you might as well take it right back. Despite this, his film prior to Shrooms was 2004’s Man About Dog. An Irish film set in Ireland with the majority of actors being Irish (and some English). Man About Dog was actually pretty good. Undoubtedly due to the lack of big studio input. The move into bed with Hollywood is like making a lasagne, replacing the mince with shit.
On to the problems with Red Mist: As I say, it’s a horror, yet the darn thing is so predictable, you’re so painfully aware of every plot turn it’s like watching it with Mystic Meg. (If she wasn’t faking). A killer, a group of people, a group of people getting killed by a killer. Simple stuff. I could probably transcribe the whole film to you, and it wouldn’t give away any spoilers (What is there to spoil?). In the first 5 minutes (maybe 3rd scene) the killees are presented as a truly awful bullying group of shit-lickers, their heads neatly secured so far up their arses, they can re-taste their breakfast. After this, it’s hard to feel any empathy for them. So why exactly should we care that they’re getting murdered? We shouldn’t. You end up siding with the murderer, he’s actually an all right guy. Which only makes it feel like you’re watching sport. All the rest of the characters, who are all doctors by the way, are so dumb they make a cabbage look like fucking Stephen Fry!
In short, DO NOT watch this film. Watch Man About Dog (if you can find it), or The Decent instead. And if you must, at least watch it with a friend, so you can trade witty banter about how shit it is. Or if you must watch it alone (for some reason) at the very least record your own witty banter to play back to yourself whilst watching it again. Because that is the only enjoyment I can imagine anyone having with it. That’s what keeps it out of my 1/10 club.
That and the cinematography, it’s actually rather well shot.
Red Mist - Brought to you by James Wormald -