20 August 2008

TTT: Death by Dialogue (1988)

A movie script possessed by an evil spirit magically adds more pages to itself which results in people dying according to the story it writes. That's as good a way to generate horror movie deaths as any other. And it has Kincaid from the Elm Street movies in it, which is neat.

Weird movie, though. Not in the "surreal scenes strung together that make no sense" sense. It's odd in that it's made up of long stretches of boring, ineptly shot sequences punctuated briefly and infrequently by very well done special effects scenes. It's like 99% of their energy went into creating the 5 or so minutes-worth of special effects in the movie and the rest was "point the camera at the actors and go take a nap."

Embarrassingly, even though the word "dialogue" is in the title, you couldn't hear much of it due to the poor audio. You could hear the rock music soundtrack just fine, though. There was a half-attempt at making this a rock-n-roll horror movie, but they didn't take it far enough. A ghost rock band makes one appearance -- and memorably crushes a guy's head with a guitar -- but they never show up after that. Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare or Hard Rock Zombies, this ain't.



d. Thomas Dewier