It's pretty standard knowledge that when you're going to make a low-budget horror movie the best types to go for, and the cheapest to make, are ones involving vampires or psycho killers. Death On Demand falls firmly into the latter category, as another slasher flick that tries to get the attention of old school fans with plentiful gore moments and naked breasts while attempting to give everything a modern spin by using the (now) old hat premise of everything being broadcast over the Internet during Halloween night.

Things start off on the right foot as sound bites from local news programs let us know the history of mountaineer Sean McIntyre, who's never quite been the same since going a bit crazy during a climb and killing his guide when he flipped and thought he was a Yeti (?!) out to attack him. It gets even messier when a nice Thanksgiving dinner goes awry after our nutty climber succumbs to the voices in his head and proceeds to slaughter his entire family (including his wife, two daughters, and his mother-in-law who is cleanly decapitated in the proceedings) before he hangs himself.

Flash forward to twenty years later where the tale of McIntyre has become local legend and the house it all occurred in still stands empty. Enter zealous college entrepreneur Rich (Dan Falcone), who has decided to offer a five thousand dollar prize to anyone who can spend the night in the house while he broadcasts is via the web and charges people to subscribe. To add interest, he's also made it so our three competing twenty-something couples will hold a séance to try and contact our dead killer, as well as recruiting a bubble-chested porn star called Velvet Luv (Krista Grotte) to add some sex to the mix.

It seems the perfect scheme what with all the bickering going on and Velvet's multiple attempts to bed everyone - since Rich has offered her a five-hundred-dollar bonus for each person she does. But, little do they know, their little Ouija board outing has brought McIntyre back to life and he's about to have a fun evening killing off the contestants one-by-bloody-one using various mountain climbing tools.

In the hands of co-writer/director Adam Matalon, Death On Demand certainly goes for the gusto on the bloodshed side of things as people take ice picks to the chest, have their leg tendons ripped out, and get various sharp instruments shoved into their bodies (the best one involves a clipper-like device going into someone's mouth) and Grotte gets to bare her implants as much as humanly possible, but things get derailed simply due to the fact that most of these things don't start to happen until the movie is over halfway done.

Throw into that mix the fact that the acting is generally all-around bad and that most of the dialogue consists of petty bickering and multiple uses of the word "Hey!" to start a lot of sentences. It certainly has to say something when the best performance in the movie comes from the Grotte as the XXX film star and even she's pretty passable. Falcone actually isn't too bad and wears a smirk most of the time, while Brandon Goins (playing football moron, Brad, who's having trouble getting it up) comes out the worst here showing no idea how to deliver his lines and having to do a couple of "huh?" fart jokes to boot.

Death On Demand just can't rise above being anything more than a dull, cheapie slasher movie. Sure, I enjoyed the deaths and the final shot is pretty decent (even though it somewhat cribs from A Nightmare On Elm Street), but the acting is crappy, things take a little too long to get rolling, and the script never goes with a throw-away idea we see early where the presence of our killer is heralded by people feeling cold and seeing their breath on the air - it would've been a neat little detail but, like most of the things on display here, just doesn't pan out. (Chris Hartley, 8/18/08)

Directed By: Adam Matalon.
Written By: Kevin Burke, Adam Matalon, Brian O'Hara.

Starring: Elisabeth Jamison, Dan Falcone, Jerry Broome, Josh Folan.

Picture Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: There's a little bit of mild fuzz and softness to the picture but the transfer here generally looks decent and it's clean of debris.

Extras: The disc we recieved only contained a trailer but the retail version will also include a commentary track as well as outtakes.

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