Rating: N/A
Dir: Brian Yuzna
Star: Billy Warlock, Devin DeVasquez, Evan Richards, Ben Meyerson
[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.