Rating: C-
Dir: Scott Kenyon Barker
Star: Mai-Ly Duong, Robbie Daymond, Jaime Perkins, Christopher Burnham
Despite some ideas with potential, this isn’t able to deliver on them. I got my hopes up briefly, on seeing Tiffany Shepis’s name second-billed in the credits. Sadly, these were cruelly dashed when her role as a park ranger is abruptly terminated, the Tiffster collecting her cheque a mere three minutes and twenty seconds into proceedings. I wonder what she did with the rest of her lunch break? Anyway, she is trying to help two women whose car is broken down, when they are all dispatched by a killer. He then turns his attention to the Sackett family, who are murdered in similarly brutal fashion. Fast forward a year, with the house, remarkably, looking exactly as it did on the night.
The plot then starts in earnest, with six college kids moving in, in order to carry out a class project. For some bizarre reason, this involves restaging the murders and broadcasting them over the Internet. Exactly what class this would be for is unclear, unless their school has a course in Deathsploitation 1.0.1. I mean, these people even have a pool party one night, inviting what appears to be most of their campus. So, yeah. There’s that. It’s not long before members of the group start vanishing, threatening phone calls are received, and the video stream tampered with. Personally, I’d be out of there. Of course, these are horror movie characters and are made of much sterner stupider stuff.
The opening is kinda impressive: while the gore is basic, it’s used in a way that feels nasty and leaves the viewer somewhat uneasy. However, it’s almost all downhill from there. Once the opening credits roll, there’s precious little of note on the “horror” front, save an aborted attempt by other locals to explore the house. They meet the killer outside, and the performances on view there are so rank, you have to side with the maniac. Inside, there’s not much going on at all. Barker seems to be trying to generate tension, with a Scream-like way, with suspicions being internally focused. Except he has little to offer except, as this suggests, ideas cribbed from other, better slasher pics.
I didn’t mind Duong as lead character Kim-ly. The actress is lumbered with some scenes where she’s speaking her character’s inner monologue, and it’s credit to her that these are only moderately painful. But the rest of the cast reach only functional at best. And if you’re going to use a body-double for Perkins to show some gratuitous tits, maybe make sure the stand-in doesn’t have a tramp stamp, not present on your actress. Just a thought. The story eventually makes its way to an ending where the killer is revealed, to no great surprise and likely less impact. It’s especially true since nothing is entirely resolved, because there’s a post-credit sequence to set up Dead on Site 2, Fifteen years later, it may be time to stop holding our breath for that.