Writer/director Alan Rowe Kelly's dark morbid horror flick has a golden final forty-five minutes; too bad the first seventy-five or so are a bit shaky.

Zoe Dalman Chlanda stars as the odd new girl in the small town of Port Oram who gets a job at the local funeral home. Not too long after that people start turning up dead, she has all sorts of whacked-out visions and she keeps her "lover" in a trunk. Also throw into the mix necrophelia, grave robbing, black humour and some well done gore effects and you have an effort that may be flawed in some ways (mostly due to being a tad too long and suffering from acting that is at times amateurish - though the leads do fine) but still manages to be watchably twisted and recommended due to the aformentioned last third.

In fact the entire thing has a demented feel to it, Kelly packs in some very effective moments (such as the one involving the needle, the "corpse in drawer" moment and Chlanda's flashback to slaughtering her parents), there's a chase sequence that ends-up in the ruins of a house and ends with fairly brutal results that works well and the entire thing is certainly "different" than most indie horrors out there (a lot of which stick to the reliable vampire and slasher sub-genres).

The score by Tom Burns is suitably eerie at times and I love the moment where a stripper asks who a masked Chlanda is and she replies, "just your average homicidal maniac".

Visit Heretic Films for more information and to order. (Chris Hartley, 6/23/04)

Directed By: Alan Rowe Kelly.
Written By: Alan Rowe Kelly.

Starring: Zoe Daelman Chlanda, Bill Corry, Catherine O'Sullivan, Jerry Murdock.

Picture Ratio: 1.85:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: Given that this is an indie flick it suffers from being a bit fuzzy at times and it can't handle the bar scene's saturation of the colour red too well, but overall it's mostly stable.

Extras: 3 trailers, a photo gallery, bloopers and nineteen(!) deleted scenes (which are on the menu under "Dead & Buried").