Dark Reel is a movie that completely had me for the first half-an-hour before it pissed it all away with a half-baked ghost sub-plot and disintegrated into silliness before completely losing its footing in the finale third. It just doesn't seem like director Josh Eisenstadt and writer Aaron Pope are quite sure what kind of film they want to make.

It starts off with a nourish black and white opening where a wannabe actress going to a screen test and ends-up being dismembered and killed which is staged in a blood soaked and effective way (using no sound and dwelling on the dark blood) while the credits roll. From there the story fast forwards fifty-three-years and takes more of a smirky, satirical bent making fun of low-budget filmmaking before shitting the bed with all that ghost talk I mentioned earlier. It's one thing to try and blend sub-genres together but when you've got humour, slasher flick elements, and a ghost story bumping up against each other things can get a little bit messy - and the movie runs about twenty-minutes too long because of that fact.

Edward Furlong plays horror movie fan Adam who enters a contest to win a role in Spotlight Motion Pictures latest film, "Pirate Wenches". The studio is run by Pritchett (Lance Henriksen), an asshole cheapskate who picks Adam from a small list of entrants. Which is great for our shy movie fan as he gets the chance to meet his favourite b-movie actress, Cassie Blue (Tiffany Shepis, turning in possibly her best performance to date, she's pretty adorable here). However, problems are about to occur when people involved with the studio start getting killed off by a psychopath wearing a mask that looks like a blonde haired corpse who is missing their nose.

Various actors start dropping like flies with one of Cassie's co-star friends having their throat slit before being decapitated (the movie's best effect) while Pritchett freaks out about losing his actors and jerk-off director Derek Deeds (Jeffrey Vincent Parise) acts like a prick to everyone and gets more and more jealous of the fact that Adam and Cassie seem to have fallen for each other.

It's during these early moments that I was enjoying my time with Dark Reel. I liked the sense of humour on display about low-budget filmmaking, thought the killer (and that neat mask) wasn't too bad, and smiled to myself about the decision to cast Furlong, Shepis, Henriksen and Candyman himself Tony Todd in the movie. I was even willing to forgive the fact things were dragging a little because I was enjoying the likeable performances put forward by the cast. But about the time that Furlong's Adam sees a ghost during the screening of 'dailies' and proceeds to get mad about it is where I started to have my doubts.

I'm not above giving credit to movies that try something new, but I'm also fully aware of when a movie shouldn't try and get too ambitious for its own good. I would have been perfectly happy if this stayed a straight-ahead slasher movie, even if the kill scene by the pool using a sword is sloppily shot, but instead the script flops about never really sure what direction it wants to go. I fully get that the ghost is of Scarlett May, the girl we saw killed in the opening moments, but the whole "set her free by finding her killers" hokum is overdone and boring by now. Hell, only Shepis' shower scene managed to keep me interested during the lame finale.

I really wanted to like Dark Reel more than I did. It's got a great cast, a highly entertaining first third, and some stylish direction. It's because of those facts alone I'm not ranking it as low as I should. It's completely overlong and scattershot which is too bad because there's a good idea lurking here amongst all the over-indulgence. (Chris Hartley, 4/15/09)

Directed By: Josh Eisenstadt.
Written By: Aaron Pope.

Starring: Lance Henriksen, Edward Furlong, Tracey Walter, Tiffany Shepis.

Picture Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: While there's a few specks scattered about the picture here is clean looking and the clarity is pretty darn good for a low-budget flick.

Extras: The disc we recieved only contained the movie but the retail version comes with two commentary tracks, a still gallery, deleted scenes with optional commentary, a trailer, and "The Making of Gnome Killer 2" featurette. SOunds like a pretty good package of stuff to me.

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