Dead 7 (2000)

Posted on Jun 04, 2003 under Horror |

aka Dead Seven

Written, produced, and directed by Garrett Clancy
Starring
- Tanya Dempsey
- Tracy Keijser
- Joe Miles
- Matt Emery
- Delia Copold

Here’s one of the ugly truths you discover once you watch enough shot-on-video movies: Most of the microbudget features shot on low-end video really wouldn’t benefit from having been shot on high-end video or film. Why? Because most of these filmmakers don’t really know how to use the resources they have or how to tell their story visually. Translating most of these to a more professional medium would show up their lack of skill with a camera of any variety (not to mention deficiencies in script, acting, production design, etc.).

Helluva retirement plan.

So I’m happy to say that Garrett Clancy is one SOV director who isn’t content to shoot a boring-looking movie simply because of the technical limitations of the medium. The story may not be groundbreaking, but at least the camera is used fluidly and actively as a storytelling tool, rather than as a simple recorder of what happens in front of it. In contrast to so many other features shot on video, Dead 7 would come off better if done in film; the more expensive and “professional” medium would exhibit well the camera work and visual storytelling, instead of simply showing up deficiencies.

Be that as it may, this is still a very cheap production, so we’re going to have a bare minimum of characters, and our locations will be limited to a couple of easily-obtainable interiors and lots of public land. Hey, you use what you can get, right? (It’s still better than, say, shooting a Martian epic on the same budget.)

“So if Tanya Dempsey’s standing right over there, howcome we’re looking at each other?”

Our story, such as it is, is thus: Local meth dealer Brownley Dawkins (Joe Myles) and his henchman Franky (Matt Emery) take a turncoat further down the foodchain out into the woods to deal with him. Said underling’s crimes include not only stealing from the boss, but responding to the boss’s girl Julie (Tanya Dempsey). (In fact, Dawkins set him up by telling Julie to come onto him as a test. The fact that she’s Tanya Dempsey scarcely makes it fair, don’t you think?) Hawkins decides to do it the old-fashioned way — with an axe. They then dump the body down an abandoned mineshaft.

Meanwhile, simpleminded Venus (Delia Copold) is playing hide-and-seek with her deafmute brother Harley (Brett Chukerman, who bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Elijah Wood), and he’s a little too good at it; she hasn’t seen him in hours. Also in this little tract of forest are Dawkins’ and Franky’s girlfriends, Julie (the aforementioned Tanya Dempsey) and Karen (Tracy Keijser), and their coed friend Drusilla (Gina Zachory). They’ve just come up here because they’re taking an art class together, and they’re looking for pinecones and crap for a project. (Ain’t it always the way? Miles and miles of pristine woodlands, and everyone hangs out without a stone’s throw of the murder scene.)

That Dawkins — always going off half-cocked in the bedroom.

As luck would have it, Franky’s dropped his wallet down the mineshaft, so he and Dawkins have to sneak back for it without letting the girls know what they were doing up there in the first place. As further luck would have it, deaf Harley wanders onto the scene and sees the corpse down the mineshaft. Unceremoniously, they dump him down with the corpse in the mineshaft, and here’s where one of those nifty cinematic visuals comes along: juxtaposed images of Venus calling for Harley and banging the ground with a stick (so that he’ll feel the vibrations, you know) and Harley down the shaft, clawing frantically at the earthen walls and trying unsuccessfully to scream.

Cut to three months later, and it should come as no surprise for you that a secret someone (with a sepia-toned point of view) starts killing the drug dealers and their girlfriends. (It should also come as no surprise to you that the sepia POV manages to have a good long look at Frankie and Karen gettin’ sweaty together before it interrupts.) Could it be Venus, taking revenge for her brother’s eventual death down the mineshaft? (She’s still wandering around, complaining dejectedly about the world’s longest game of hide-and-seek. But she’s crazy, you know; it could still be her.) Could it be Harley himself, after he eventually escaped from the shaft? Or could it be Harley… who didn’t ever escape alive?

“This time, YOU dip ME!”

Writer/director Garrett Clancy (who also played the lone sheriff) has several more credits as a writer than as a director (including one for Zombie Chronicles). Usually, when a writer becomes a director, you expect to see someone whose main goal is the preservation of his script and story from the hands of a philistine directorial hack. Which makes it even more surprising to see here that Clancy’s a pretty darned good director with the (lack of) resources he’s working with here. He may even be a better director than he is a writer. There’s certainly more verve and spunk to his visual style than to this particular screenplay, which has its full share of nifty ideas that don’t really get developed. (One of them is the fact that, since Dawkins put Julie up to “testing the loyalty” of the dead dealer, he hasn’t made whoopie with her — he’s been too suspicious that she may have agreed too readily. There’s something to be said here about the loneliness and isolation inherent in this kind of extralegal profession, but it doesn’t really get said; the subplot lasts about two minutes before getting subsumed back into the main storyline.)

This isn’t one of those situations, though, in which upgrading to film would merely show up the other demerits. Clancy’s got enough command of the language of visual storytelling that a more expensive visual presentation of the same material would actually help spackle over some of the faultlines in the story. It still wouldn’t fit anyone’s definition of a great movie, or even a cult classic — but some of the little haunting images are of the kind that linger with the viewer long after the rest of the movie has dissolved in memory. As minor as that seems, not every director can pull it off.

How they make marzipan.

(A side note, and I’m sorry, but it must be said: Whoever wrote the copy on the back of the box needs to be taken out and given a kerosene enema. It looks like he gleaned what he could of the plot from the trailer, then wrote his version through a haze of recreational pharmaceuticals.)