Canetoad
The Prodigal Toad
HMaM member of the Month, July 2006
Cry Havoc! And let slip the cats of war.
Posts: 2,868
|
Post by Canetoad on Apr 3, 2007 4:49:30 GMT -5
HEADSPACE
Rated MA
THIS is one horror fans are either going to love or loathe. There will be very little middle ground. Part monster flick, part psychological thriller and part confused as it what it wants to be, Headspace almost defies definition. But it is gripping, with enough very strong character development and teasers as to what’s to come to hook you completely. In short we are introduced to Alex as a young boy who witnesses his father blast his mother’s face off with a shotgun – with good reason as it turns out… I think. To call Alex a genius is an understatement. He’s an intellectual freak, and he has visions, bad ones, and people around him are dying in nasty ways. The cast – including the agelessly beautiful Olivia Hussey (genre fans my remember her from Black Christmas) is just superb, and for a first time feature from director Andrew van den Houten it smacks of a much bigger budget than probably really existed. Headspace is one of those films I was absolutely captured by, but need to watch again to work out whether I loved it or not. Give it a try. If you want smart horror, this might be right up your frontal lobe.
Four stars.
|
|
|
Post by GL on Apr 3, 2007 10:43:38 GMT -5
“Headspace” is such a disappointment for such a cool premise.
**SPOILERS**
Following a traumatic childhood experience, Alex Borden, (Christopher Denham) is troubled by serious headaches as an adult, which even Dr. Ira Gold, (William Atherton) his assistant Dr. Denise Bell, (Dee Wallace-Stone) or psychiatrist Dr. Karen Murphy, (Olivia Hussey) can solve. As he attempts to make ground on his prognosis, even with long-lost brother Harry Jellenik, (Erick Kastel) he is still tormented by his visions. When a killing spree begins with his friends being killed, he begins to think he has something to do with it, until he finds that a dark secret buried with him from his younger days has come back to haunt him, and he races to control the secret before it breaks out and more of his friends are killed.
The Good News: There isn’t a whole lot here that’s any good. Some of the kills in the film are fantastic. The opening death is quite exquisite, and is made all the sweeter by the fact that the killer is that close to them, and that it happened right in front of kids. There’s something pretty twisted about having two children see a person take a shotgun round to the face. It’s the single best scene in the film. The other kills aren’t that bad either, including an especially messy one where a clawed arm breaks forth from the stomach and reaching up, clawing up the face and removing skin. It’s hard to top the opening kill for brutality and overall impact, but that one really comes the closest. The brief shots of the monster give it a wonderful Lovecraftian vibe to it, and being a costume and not a CGI creation make it all the better. The other thing about this that’s really interesting is the main premise. It’s pretty original and very creative, mixing two genres that have very little in common together and making an honest attempt at incorporating them together. Otherwise, this was a sadly disappointing effort.
The Bad News: This is a really disappointing film. One of the biggest crimes is the sudden experiences of exponential growth in the powers of his intellect that fail to impress. He is able to memorize entire books in seconds and answer questions before they have been asked, but simply, they don’t do much of anything to incite fear. Those are incredibly dull experiences to classify as being horrific and really fail to excite. The other big important mistake was that they actually showed the monsters from another dimension in clear and lingering views in good lighting, which is a bad choice. There has never been a good visual representation of a Lovecraftian monster because they are more terrifying in our heads, but when they are on screen, they loose all their power. This is quite disappointing, since it really had this going in the right direction for a long time, showing only the reactions of someone looking at the horrifying paintings. Instead of showing the monster eating one victim’s head, it would be from the POV of an observer peeking around the corner, able to see only twitching feet. That kind of suggestive technique is exactly how the film should have proceeded. After all, the story is not really about the monsters but about the madness and fear those monsters induce in the humans who sense their presence. Unfortunately, the feeling that to represent the monsters physically was a mistake. Anther thing that hurts it is that it tries to be too smart for its own good. It throws a lot of information out in an attempt to explain why they are having the visions and what’s happening, but in an effort to explain as much as possible while also trying to leave just enough out for interpretation, it ends up that you get both too much information and not enough. It’s explained why his visions were triggered, but not how. It touched on it but not enough to quench it. There are times when ambiguous works, and this is not one of them. These make it a really disappointing film, when it had so much going for it.
The Final Verdict: A really disappointing film that had a cool premise, but it ultimately suffers from several different problems that drag it down a notch. It’s decent enough for a viewing, as these won’t keep you from enjoying it any less, as they are fundamental problems rather than physical, so if it sounds intriguing, give it a shot.
Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, a strong sex scene, Nudity and drug use
|
|