• Directed by Josh Eisenstadt
• Written by Aaron Pope
• Starring
  • Lance Henriksen
  • Edward Furlong
  • Tiffany Shepis
  • Tony Todd
  • Jeffrey Vincent Parise

The first scene of Dark Reel exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of the movie as a whole:

Set during the ’50s and shot in black and white, a blonde named Scarlett May (Alexandra Holden) drinks alone at a Hollywood bar. A well-dressed young man (Daniel Wisler) enters and makes some small talk with her, although she’s not very forthcoming. That changes, though, when he produces a card and says he’s with Spotlight National Films, since she is, naturally, an actress. He offers her a screentest right then, and they go back at night to the studio lot. He puts her in a spotlight and asks her to “be yourself.” Then he disappears. She looks around, uncertain — and suddenly he comes from behind her with a huge knife. Blood is spattered; limbs are severed.

The scenes in the bar encapsulate a decadent Hollywood underside in the ’50s. The screentest on the empty soundstage, with the blonde Scarlett thrown into high contrast by the lights against an invisible black interior, is a striking visual. The performances are charming and low-key. And the display of rubbery detached limbs, shaken so that syrupy blood will drip from them for the benefit of the camera, is cheap-looking and artless, like a backyard slasher movie.

That’s how Dark Reel is all the way through: Good filmmaking and fine performances sabotaged regularly by ham-handed and ill-thought-out scenes and subplots.

“When you wish upon a staaaar…”

In the present, B-movie film fan Adam (Edward Furlong) lives in a small apartment decorated with scream queen posters. If you’ve seen Furlong recently, since he outgrew being the juvenile John Connor in Terminator 2 (1991), you know that the once-expected leading-man good looks have instead become baggy eyes, reedy voice, and slouching shoulders — a perfect fit for this role. Adam came to Hollywood from Virginia, pursuing a star-struck girlfriend who now wants no part of him. After a final attempt to connect with her, he enters a “Win a walk-on role in a horror movie!” contest on a whim.

The contest is being sponsored by Spotlight National Films — yes, they’re still around — which is run by Connor Pritchett (the ever enjoyable Lance Henriksen), who comes across as a combination of Rober Corman, Charles Band, and my boss. (Don’t tell my boss.) He’s a demanding, humorless S.O.B. Who’s getting tired of all the swimming it takes to keep the sharks at bay. Dark Reel is set in an alternate universe where the kind of quickie productions that Spotlight National specializes in are still considered part (though a disreputable part) of the Hollywood establishment, instead of the overlapping but completely separate industry that are treated as today, only slightly more visible to Variety and The Hollywood Reporter than porn.

The current production that Pritchett is stressing over is Pirate Wench, a vaguely sexy (female pirates wore high heels?) actioner shot entirely on a replica pirate ship moored at the harbor. The star is Cassie Blue (Tiffany Shepis), scream queen supreme; think of the real Tiffany Shepis, then imagine that in this alternate universe she has real prospects. (That’s not a slam. In every feature in which I’ve seen her, Shepis is a consummate professional. But the Hollywood of the Roger Corman heyday is gone; actors like Jack Nicholson can’t start at the low end of the stardom spectrum and work their way up. Nowadays, the actors and actresses who start in the shot-on-video D2DVD arena stay there; A-listers come down, as demonstrated by Henriksen and Furlong, but Z-listers don’t come up, especially with actresses. Sorry to disillusion all of your waiting for Debbie Rochon and Tina Krause to get their big break; they can only continue to be big fish in a very small, very cheap pond, ability be damned.)

B-movie starlets go wild over guys who look like Al Gore. Really.

This is naturally the production on which Adam has his one-line role, and he’s a starstruck fanboy when introduced to all of them, especially Cassie. For her part, Cassie is friendly and sociable — certainly more than a sex-symbol scream queen would be to a slightly creepy fanboy. I did mention that this is an alternate universe, right? (I have to wonder what the on-set dynamics were like. Shepis is getting to be a biggish fish in a small pond, but Furlong’s feature was budgeted at $100 million. And Henriksen’s had the kind of career that most Hollywooders would kill for, even with his almost-complete descent from theatricals to DTV features these days. How hard did Shepis find it to stay in character as the “movie star” when her co-stars had been for-real movie stars?)

In fact, being the down-to-earth girl she is, she invites him to the after-shoot get-together at a local bar, and they proceed to hit it off. Is Cassie going to become an item with a fanboy? Most of the rest of the cast and crew thinks she will, and turn their noses up at the possibility. Not that Furlong plays his Adam persona as the stereotypical socially-skilless loser, but… well, look at him.

Oh, right, horror movie. There is some horror in here, and it has nothing to do with the blurring of Hollywood class distinctions. Lorraine, one of the Pirate Wench wenches, returns to her trailer and is confronted by someone in a dark overcoat, a long blonde wig, and a skull-like mask; he tosses her to the floor and slashes her throat. It’s a well-done effect, especially since low-budget throat-slashing is usually so poorly done.

In Hollywood, even the masked killers have perfectly-applied lipstick.

So. We’ve got a movie production, we’ve got a mysterious killer, and we’ve got an outsider on set who naturally attracts suspicion (especially after his part gets bumped up in the emergency rewrite after Lorraine’s death), both from the director Derek (Jeffrey Vincent Parise), who wants to get into Cassie’s pants himself, and from the two homicide detectives Shields and LaRue (Tony Todd [!] and Rena Riffel, and reproduce all my comments above about sliding down the ladder of production quality for Todd’s benefit). Who could be murdering the cast members? Why? And what does all of this have to do with the murder of Scarlett May?

Because it does, you know. Adam notices early on that there are lost-dog-style flyers posted on telephone poles in the area which only feature an action photo of Scarlett and one word “Despair,” “Scandal,” “Vanity,” etc. And then…

Up to now, everything in this movie has been competent and sometimes even commendable. But then Adam starts seeing the ghost of Scarlett May during a dailies screening, though she’s invisible to all others. This is about an hour into the movie — in other words, way to damned late to start including a supernatural angle. More than anything, the sudden appearance of Scarlett’s ghost seems like evidence of a desperate screenwriter who realizes that none of the characters have any reason to find and follow the trail to the “real” murderer without an intervention of fiat. (Or maybe screenwriter Aaron Pope, who was also script supervisor on the similarly-themed Cut Throat (2002), was trying to find any way to distinguish the two movies.)

Sometimes, being the go-to guy for Bigfoot movies isn’t consolation enough.

By the end, the wheels have coming flying off this train, thanks to one of my least favorite slasher movie cliches: The killer who turns out to have been a character who has acted well-adjusted and in control up until now, but becomes a raving madman when he strips off the mask and the Scooby-Doo gang gasps, “It’s you!” And that’s a pity, because the first half of the movie was well set-up and plausible, at least by the terms of the alternate universe in which it’s set.

In fact, once the ghost appears, even the story elements not touched by the supernatural get less and less justifiable. It’s eventually revealed that Scarlett’s killer was, of course, Connor Pritchett. But he picked her at random, carved her up calmly on camera — and then apparently never killed again. If you’re looking for something a lot less plausible than a ghost showing up in the middle of a screening and making vague plot-necessary gestures to the one person almost powerless to take any action, this is it.

Acting is uniformly good — uniformly, except for the glaring exception of Jake Grace as Rhett Johnson, the male lead in Pirate Wench: even when the camera’s off, he acts like an amalgam of Clark Gable, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and Captain Jack Sparrow. He’s so over the top that everyone else has to dial it back to keep this movie from becoming a spoof.

How do you get the star and the director to stop sniping at each other? THAT’S how.

In an odd sense, Furlong’s and Shepis’ good performances work against them. Furlong does great as a somewhat-introverted-but-not-socially-crippled outside to “the business” (the way in which he isn’t instantly cowed by the attention of the detectives is a refreshing touch), and Shepis works well as a B-movie star who hasn’t adopted the de rigueur bitchiness of most of her peers. That said, we can still see no way in hell that these two would get together and get groiny, which they proceed to do.

The highlight/lowlight award goes to the scene in which Detective Shields interviews/interrogates Pritchett after two murders (again, a scene after the ghost first appears, and suddenly what was once an intelligent script suddenly concentrates on dunderheaded moves). Here are Lance Henriksen and Tony Todd, two actors far above their pay scale, and all the script hands them to do is an inane circumlocution as the two genteelly try to establish Alpha Male status. Such a waste.

So putting Dark Reel in context among it’s peers: Better than Cut Throat, but nowhere near as fun as Gingerdead Man 2 (2008).

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Tony Todd (Detective Shields) played Worf’s brother Kurn in several episodes of TNG and DS9, the adult Jake Sisco in the DS9 episode “The Visitor,” and “Alpha Hirogen” in the Voyager episode “Prey”
  • Tracey Walter (“Roy White,” the paparazzi) played “Kayron” on the TNG episode “The Last Outpost” and “Berik” in the TNG episode “Rascals”