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 esides being incredibly lacking in originality, scares, or
even those small guilty pleasures I always manage to find in any Slasher film,
the new British Slasher flick "Long Time Dead" doesn't even have the
decency to flash some T&A in my direction. How utterly…lacking. Or
pathetic, might be the right word.
"Long Time Dead" is just plain…bad. The
movie is about the usual suspects of Slasher victims – er, characters. That
is, party-hardy teens or 20-somethings who indulges in sex, drugs, and
rock'n'roll on a nightly basis. Our group of brain dead partygoers decide it'll
be a nice "buzz" to play a game of Quiji boarding (is that a word?) in
an abandoned warehouse one night. Things get out of hand and one boy flees the
scene, leaving the others to wonder if they've just summoned a real life ghost.
That same night, one of the players end up dead, falling through a skylight into
a nightclub with burn marks all over her legs. Ouch. Things don't get better for
our other victims as it becomes known a fire demon called the Djinn has been set
loose, and it's out for blood…
At this point, I said to myself: Wait a minute, I thought
the Djinn was a demon that granted wishes, and then killed you by twisting and
perverting your wishes into something nasty?
Slasher movies are a dime a dozen nowadays, and I suppose
it was inevitable that someone else would reach into the same bag of tricks and
pull out a similar villain such as the Djinn. I wonder if the people responsible
for the American B-horror franchise "Wishmaster" have a good lawyer?
As it stands, the Djinn in "Long Time Dead" looks like a bad refugee
from "Buffy the Vampire
Slayer," so I suppose the wish-granting Djinn
from "Wishmaster" is probably safe from being surpassed.
It deserves to be mentioned again that "Long Time
Dead" is just bad. I mean bad in the sense that you shake your head
and wonder why in the world someone green lit this movie. Even more mind numbing
is how and why did it take six (count them, six!) writers
to come up with this garbage? "Long Time Dead" is so lacking in
anything remotely approaching entertainment that getting through its 84-odd
minutes was a chore worthy of Sainthood. I have never witnessed something so
terrible, so utterly boring and underwhelming in my life. Even for a Slasher
film with cardboard characters, "Long Time Dead" fails in every
category imaginable. And believe me, I do not exaggerate by making these points,
dear readers.
Let's list the failures, shall we? There's the characters.
When I discovered that the filmmakers had stacked 8 (count them, eight)
kids to be victims to our evil, mysterious Djinn (Tongue firmly in cheek
here, folks.), I was expecting, if nothing else, at least a high bodycount.
Even the worst Slasher films can be saved by a high bodycount and inspired kill
scenes. "Long Time Dead" doesn't seem to be concern with kill scenes,
despite the fact that it is all about being a Slasher film. Does that
make sense to you? It certainly doesn't make any sense to me. Why make a Slasher
film and then deny the audience of even the slightest bit of guilty pleasure?
All the criteria of Slasher movies are here, and the
filmmakers even use, as their first victim, a girl we see shagging (that's
British for "getting horizontal") her boyfriend at a nightclub. Of
course, being that "Long Time Dead" is going out of its way to not
entertain you, we don't even get a decent shot of the sex – or what passes for
sex, since we see the girl straddle her boyfriend and cut away. Sigh.
The film also drags out the stalk scenes to infinity. Stalk
scenes are where a character wanders around in the dark, around a dark house, or
dark hallway being stalked by "invisible" ghosts (re: the camera).
It's not bad enough that the stalking goes on forever, but more than half the
time nothing happens. There is no payoff, and even if there is a payoff,
the filmmakers seem to have mistaken their production for a classy film and
refuse to show the killings onscreen. It is at this point that I wonder why the
filmmakers don't just poke my eyes out with chopsticks and call it a day.
And the music. Don't even get me started on the music.
"Long Time Dead" features one of the most obnoxious, loud, and pointless
musical score I have come across in a long, long time. Forget for one moment
that I am a student of film and thus have seen so many Slasher films I should be
committed, but why in the world do the filmmakers feel it is necessary to put
every single stalk scene to loud, pounding music that just screams, "Get
ready kids! Here it comes! Here it comes!" And of course, 6 out of 10
times, nothing comes.
I normally start listing actors and the names of filmmakers
here, but why bother? The actors are all new faces that picked this film as a
stepping-stone, so they can't be faulted for choosing this insipid trash. (It is
probably a given that they will probably go on to bigger and better things. They
would have to, wouldn't they?) The filmmakers, and all six (six!!)
writers, on the other hand, should be fasten to the back of a pick-up and
dragged up and down an Interstate road, then chastised for making me sit through
this…thing.
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