Messages

Stars: Jeff Fahey, Kim Thompson, Jon-Paul Gates, Martin Kove, Bruce Payne, Geraldine Alexander, Eileen Daly, Samia Rida

Director: David Fairman

One of the scarier sights at the movies are those dedicated never-miss-a genre-film horrorflick addicts (OK, I admit Im one of them) who never let a shocker pass without dissecting and discussing it to the point of tedium. And tedium is certainly the point of this pointless, unutterably awful saga of the hunt for a serial killer given to removing the eyes from his female victims.

Fahey, playing a pathologist still traumatised by the murder of his wife, and Kove, as the American exchange police cowboy cop on the case, continue the hallowed tradition of career-stalled American stars forced to make bad British movies that marked post-war British double feature.

Its hard to know which is worse their understandably uninspired, awful acting or the truly terrible screenplay handed them by the writers, one of whom, a real-life pathologist, amazingly couldnt see that his script was dead on arrival. The dead, incidentally, rise at the welcome climax of this nonsense. Understandably under the circumstances the film and its cast are unable to follow suit.

Fairman sets his supremely silly show in an over-idealized English countryside that makes Midsomer Murders resemble an urban slum, drenching the drivel with an irritatingly brooding score. Horrific stuff and not in the way intended.

Alan Frank

UK 2007. UK Distributor: Spark Pictures. Colour.
93 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 15.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 2, Violence/Horror 2, Drugs 0, Swearing 2.

Review date: 15 Jun 2007