Rating: E
Dir: “Victoria Sloan” [David DeCoteau]
Star: Tanya Dempsey, Jamie Gannon, Parry Allen, Alison Cuffe
a.k.a. Shriek
Perhaps the most telling thing on the promo material for this video was the phrase “teen horror is a highly profitable genre”. Roughly translated, any cheaply made dreck will make its money back. This one, however, may be pushing it: with no name stars, its sole rentals may be from illiterates who mistake it for Scream. It won’t be helped by the fact that it’s pretty dreadful: lock up a bunch of students in a hospital, to be fodder for an extremely unconvincing monster — a rather more “lurking horror” approach would have helped greatly.
The only interesting touch is that one student has set the whole thing up, and the victims all have ‘Night of the Demon’-style occult papers, onto which the monster homes in. This potentially interesting and paranoia-generating angle is disposed of in about ten minutes however, and it all turns out exactly how you’d expect. The main saving grace is that it’s a scant 72 minutes from start to finish, so at least I don’t feel that I wasted too much time…