HorrorVision (2001)

Posted on Mar 28, 2001 under Horror, Sci-fi |

Directed by Danny Draven
Written by Scott Phillips
Starring
- Jake Leonard
- Maggie Rose Fleck
- James Black
- Brinke Stevens
Produced by J.R. Bookwalter and Chuck Williams
Executive produced by Charles Band

HorrorVision has something that is desperately missing from most recent Full Moon Pictures releases. No, it isn’t a budget; both the “making of” segment after the feature and the official website will tell you that this one almost crosses the line from low-budget to no-budget (although the 12-day shooting schedule dwarfs some other Full Moon efforts). It’s not a full running time; the only way this feature even nears the 70-minute mark is with pretty blatant padding. It’s not a stunning script; you see some of the usual hallmarks of a Full Moon production — roles for a cadre of pretty twenty-somethings and a critter with a snappy handle for a name. So what is it? What is is that this movie has that most Full Mooners don’t?

This movie has style.

Director Danny Draven (only twenty-three years old, damn him) manages to take the script and resources handed to him by J.R. Bookwalter and Charles Band and infuse them with a vitality that you just don’t see these days in a David DeCoteau crank-out. It’s a rougher, edgier production, an admitted example of “guerilla filmmaking,” and though it’s flawed, it’s encouraging.

Another needless tragedy which could have been avoided through the proper application of gaffer’s tape.

Protagonist Dez (Jake Leonard) is a goth/geek hybrid (and I suppose the influence of one smooths the rough edges of the other), a tech-toy junkie who makes his living as a digital purveyor of porn, above the gentle objections of his live-in, Dazzie (Maggie Rose Fleck). Hmm — Dez and Dazzie. I guess when it’s the one, you just know. (He’s also a wanna-be screenwriter, natch — this is LA, after all.) His main supplier of the “raw goods” is photographer Toni (Brinke Stevens!). He’s all set to get the latest CD she’s burned for him, but unfortunately, the evening before the pickup, she logs onto a mysterious website called horrorvision.com, and after being assaulted by an overwhelming visual display (damned Flash intros), cables appear from her phone jack and electrical outlet and throttle her until — poof! — she disappears in a pixelated haze. (What, you thought they had the budget to employ Brinke for more than the first ten minutes?)

After some character moments and a fair amount of driving the next morning (apparently those scenes are cheap to shoot), Dez and Dazzie arrive (at the ominously-numbered apartment 696) to find Toni’s conspicuous absence, but Dez does find the CD for him. Going through it that night, he tries to delete the horrovision.com link he finds — and instead the same kind of display, an almost-subliminal succession of “splatter-erotica” photos, hypnotizes him, until Dazzie breaks the contact — at which time, an electrical halo envelopes her, and poof! she disappears as Toni had done.

Seeking answers, Dez goes back to Toni’s apartment, but finds only Ariauna Albright in a cameo as one of Toni’s junkie models. But when he returns to his car, he discovers Bradbury (James Black), a shiny-pated black man wearing a kick-ass black leather sleeveless overcoat. Bradbury’s cryptic remarks about computers and the nature of reality don’t wear well with a man who’s just lost his girlfriend to a website, thank you very much, and instead Dez goes on an even longer drive. (Pad pad pad…)

“Stop it. (Giggle.) That tickles.”

I should also point out that the TV and radio news have been replete with reports of spontaneous mass murders — formerly-peaceful folk going on sudden shooting rampages, ending in suicide.

Eventually, Dez ends up in a cheap motel room (why? Maybe because he considers the computer in his apartment is now dangerous, though it’s never really covered), after an altercation with a desk clerk (co-producer Chuck Williams) who’s probably one of my favorite characters here. He tries to watch some TV, but apparently all that’s on is Arcade (yes, thank you, we’ve already discovered the similarities by now) and The Dead Next Door (in case you missed J.R. Bookwalter’s name in the credits).

And that’s when things get fun. Dez has set his Palm on the nightstand, and as he sleeps it manifests a strange mechanical ball-thing, which unrolls into a mechanical centipede thing that tries to attack him. These balls are one of the greatest visuals in the movie — in actuality gold-painted Death Star models, these centipedes chase their prey like Borg versions of the Krites from Critters. And on escape, Dez meets Bradbury again, perched on his car — and this time, Dez is willing to listen.

Admit it. You always suspected something like this lurked at the heart of AOL.

Telling you much more would spoil things, but let me tell you that it all hinges on a program that created itself in the bowls of an ISP that looks like it was designed by V’GER (and is currently protected by its own Borged human), a program that is a distillation of the despair and fear and anxiety of a technologically-isolated humanity, a program that calls itself Manifesto. The weak-willed it reprograms into the instant serial killers of the last few days; the strong it digitizes and stores, like Dazzie and Toni, on CD-ROM (an irreversible process).

The final showdown takes place in the desert, and here the padded driving footage actually becomes an asset — there’s a mystique to desert scenery that’s worth all footage spent there. The actual denouement, between Dez, Bradbury, and an anthropomorphized Manifesto — is perhaps disappointingly truncated, but it’s also a perfectly reasonable setup for a sequel that could build on the foundation this movie has laid.

As the movie itself points out, what we’ve got here is very similar thematically to Arcade; however, avoiding the easy story trap of “the game that’s not a game,” HorrorVision draws also (perhaps indirectly) other sources such as Pulse (1988) and John Varley’s award-winning novella “Press Enter.” The difference is simply one of paranoia. Arcade limited it to a particular video game; but HorrorVision follows the other works cited (both of which predate the modern Internet, incidentally) in pointing out that the true danger of a vengeful AI is in its ability to use our now-essential communications network against us — to be anywhere our technological crutches are.

Every time some new damned reality show pops up, I know just how this guy feels.

In the making-of footage, Bookwalter comments that this is a movie he had originally wanted to direct, and when it became apparent that he didn’t have time, he hand-picked Draven as a protege. It was a good choice. Rather than just motor through the script in order to have something to put in a video box, Draven spends time on visuals that just plain work. Two examples:
- As Dez and Dazzie first go to Toni’s apartment, there’s a sad-eyed boy sitting in the corridor, playing with a circuitboard with fat-ass capacitors, which he soundlessly proffers to Dex.
- Driving in the desert, Dez and Bradbury pass a dead body on the side of the road, next to a burned-out TV set.

They may not sound like much as described, but that’s the point of filmmaking: To show something that just doesn’t have the same impact in any other medium.

“(Sniff sniff.) Hey — do you smell something? Like, right behind us?”

I don’t think it outlandish to assume that the more thoughtful visuals were accomodated by the longer-than-normal 12-day shoot, and the budget for said shoot was garnered by the use of digital video instead of film. With the high-end DV and the top-of-the-line FilmLook processing, most of the footage passes for film most of the time (although the video origins show most in moving shots). If such a move allows more funds to go into what happens in front of the camera, then I fervently hope that Full Moon changes to an all-digital production format.

Add to this one of the only Full Moon soundtracks that actually might be worth purchasing, and the end product is a movie which, while not great, is worth a look-see — and given the general tenor of the Full Moon catalog, that’s saying quite a lot.