A schizoid director tries to remake an old horror movie in Romania that met with disaster. There are a lot of great ideas in this film, well executed for the limited budget…
Some good acting, lots of raw emotions, and a solid pace from beginning to end.
The film brings to mind the Vietnam controversy of my generation. The peaceniks won that one. Now the industrial half of the military-industrial complex gets 70% of their profits from Red China, and the Obama administration is socialist bordering on outright communist.
Increasingly, Congress goes along with this. Anyone who objects is schizophrenic. So, here we are almost 40 years later, having flashbacks to that whole psychotic time in our nation’s history, seeing it happen all over again.
Watching all the foibles of a film in actual production never gets old. Having an emotional, enthralled, charismatic young director go into fits of hallucinogenic creativity seems quite realistic.
The executive producer, who is a real jerk with a broom stick up his ass and dollar signs in his eyes, works for me. The cameraman is good, too.
The romantic Romanian female leads is perfect, as is the sexy lady reporter with the video camera. There’s just something irresistible, mysterious, and dangerous about the Romanian babes.
Great use of psychotic flashbacks to the past, excellent how there were strange clips in the film footage itself. Demons made real like that are always scarier. The live birth of the baby was as horrific as it was memorable.
Better to show the back story as it’s told in words at the very beginning. The whole story of the original movie production comes out again along the way, but a little more detail in the very beginning would have been better.
Just not used to having to pay that much attention early on in a film.
You never see a screenplay or script on the set. Apparently the director is the writer (hint: notepad within arm’s reach at all times, scribbling bits and pieces down at random times of the day and night).
It would have been more realistic to see the film crew referring to a script now and then — maybe even dematerialize it to the script of the original film for another scary angle.
The Romanian helper Gregor got on the nerves after a while. He was a real hoot while making sly, sarcastic quips to himself (speaking in Romanian under his breath, while the translation was subtitled on the screen).
If he had done that more often his character would have been more three dimensional.
The crummy hotel was fun, with the paint peeling and a general air of dereliction. The set itself could have been a little more elaborate and labyrinthine. We see bad things happening at the upper levels several times, but they all happen in about the same place.
Better to reveal a little more about that area with each situation, to give us something new in a new setting to be freaked out about each time.
