Typical of the uneven nature of most of 2007’s “8 Films To Die For” releases, this Stan Winston production revolves around creatures that look like someone at Stan Winston Studios created a composite of earlier, better Winston-created monsters (namely, the Predator, Pumpkinhead, even the T-1000).
American ice hockey player / recovering drug addict Ian Stone (Mike Vogel) crashes his car one rainy night and appears to be killed by the peculiar monster he ran into. Instead of the cold dark nothingness of death, however, he wakes up to find himself living a different life with a different girlfriend : he’s now a London office pencil pusher. When the pattern repeats itself, he’s a taxi driver and he is warned by a stranger in the street (the kind of movie stranger who has clearly swallowed a load of Basil Exposition pills) that he is being regularly “relocated” by clawed, demonic creatures to prevent him from remembering something they don’t want him to recall. He can’t die as such but his memories and whole existence (and each “death”) are controlled by these creatures.
Just as the creatures – although fairly effective as skittering CG black wraiths – resemble a melding of past Winston creations, the screenplay is an episodic mash-up of THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT, THE MATRIX, various recent mindfuck horror movies and any modern monster movie you care to name. It doesn’t all hang together and for much of its short duration plays out like the pilot to a horror-tinged fantasy TV series, complete with a concluding set-up for future episodes. Vogel plays the understandably befuddled hero quite well in a TV-hero kind of way, but there are clumsy, heavy handed narrative parallels between the central predatory “harvesters” and his character’s nascent drug addiction.
The London backdrop allows for some good scenes on the underground, including an unnaturally deserted Charing Cross Station (home to one tramp and a handful of main characters). There are bouts of throat-slashing gore to up the otherwise limited horror quotient and even an unpleasant torture sequence in which the pic’s sexy raven-haired villainess (Jaime Murray) dons a skin-tight red cat suit for no apparent reason. (Do we need a reason? Nah, thought not) It’s all snappily paced and sometimes visually impressive, but the self-serious story gets sillier (and mushier) as it goes along, and the creature face-off during the climax plays out like outtakes from ALIEN VS PREDATOR.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
