October Horror Gauntlet Film #7

Film Number 7: Don't Look Up

October Horror Gauntlet Film #7
Don't Look Up
Directed by Fruit Chan

Fruit Chan is a director that I really wanted to catch up with after seeing his section of the anthology film Three...Extremes. His addition to that film, Dumplings, is my personal favorite of the three. And I hear tale that the full-length Gaau ji is superb, so it was a no brainer when I saw that he had an English-language film out. I was especially interested to see if he reeled in the usually zany Eli Roth.

Unfortunately, Roth is only in the film for about two minutes, and the rest of it is borderline garbage. I can't believe that this is the same guy who made the incredibly nuanced Dumplings. The whole production feels cheap - the scares, the script, the effects all feel very cheap. And you will definitely feel like you've seen this movie before - it's like The Man With the Screaming Brain meets John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, if that gives you any insight.

If you really care, the story is about a young, former wunderkind director named Marcus Reed who suffers from schizophrenic visions (or, possibly, sees ghosts). To clear his good name, he embarks on a quest to remake a classic Romanian horror tale that was begun many years ago, but never completed. The plot is more convoluted than that, it includes the true story that the original film, and subsequently the remake, is based on and a deal with a devil, but who really cares? You won't be lost by the story, but you will wonder why the hell they went through so much effort just to make a crappy story.

3/10