[2] From an effects man turned director, to
a producer turned director. Yuzna is best known as the power behind
Re-Animator and From Beyond - he's also slated to direct the
sequel to the former [??], Bride of Re-Animator, so this was
always going to be an interesting try-out. Once again, it's a film
that tells us quite a lot about the psychology of the man who
directs it. Billy plays a boy called Billy, a child of the upper
classes in West Coast America who believes that there is Something
Nasty Going On in his town. He thinks his family are aliens, that
his sister's coming-out party degenerated into an orgy (he wasn't
there) and that anyone who knows about this conspiracy has an
'accident'. Normal teenage angst I'd call it.
The problem with this
film is that for the first hour, nothing happens. Once it's been
established that he is having these 'delusions', the story goes
round in circles marking time until it's time for the big finale,
when everything is revealed and, guess what, there really IS
Something Nasty Going On in his town. Having said that, the last 25
minutes are astonishing stuff. Sick? Perverted? Gross? A little bit
of all three, leaving us with the impression that the sooner the men
in the white coats come for Mr Yuzna, the safer we'll all be. I can
understand why it ruffled a few feathers in America - the idea
behind it, that the upper classes are literally sucking the rest of
us dry (and I can say no more than that) won't win you many friends
in Hollywood.
It may not be "Ferris Bueller meets The Thing meets
Debbie Does Dallas" as Alan Jones said, but it's not bad. There is
hope for the Re-Animator sequel. If Yuzna can just sustain the pace
of the last 25 minutes for an entire film, then it could well be up
there with "Evil Dead II" in the rare category of follow-ups that
rival the original.