Director's Cut

A director of short films and music videos who has achieved some popularity within the horror community, Don Caprio makes his feature début with this tale of, well, making a music video. Whilst people are often advised to write about what they know, and there are a few humorous moments in the film stemming from that, most of the film is rather too true to life, as characters engage in trivial arguments and hang around waiting for something to happen.

The video is being made for small time punk band The Suicide Disease, a group of friends in their early twenties whose best days are already behind them. Singer Jay (Tyler Ivy), a skinny thing who spends a lot of time with his shirt off, letting us see tattoos whose tough guy implications he can’t live up to, wants to focus on creating new songs, but the others want to get back to gigging and making some money. They don’t have enough to pay for the publicity that would support that, so they accept an offer from a self-professed fan (Louis Lombardi) who is just breaking into the video-making business and is prepared to work for free to generate publicity for himself – or so he says.

What’s his name? “Mr. Director,” he says – he’s trying to make that his brand. it’s stupid, of course, but perhaps easier to believe because of that. Unlike most people in that line of work, he expects the band to come to him, at a decaying mansion in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania. He’s excited to meet them without their masks, their baby Slipknot personas left at the door. So is any common sense they might have had, as they eagerly get themselves into a series of entry-level scrapes – though it’s not as if they have much else to occupy themselves with.

The film has been sold on the basis of suffering and gore, but we’re a good two thirds of the way through before we get any of this, and whilst the effects are fairly good, connoisseurs of such fare will find better elsewhere, What’s more, we don’t get to know any of the characters well enough to care. Picking them off one by one means that the actors don’t get to fill that void by showing us characters who care about one another. In light of this, one expects that many viewers will consider the most disturbing thing in the film to be the violence done to Sisters of Mercy classic Marian over the opening credits.

There’s an assortment of odd little details in the film, from the equipment certain characters carry to the encounters they have along the way, which suggest there were subplots here that ended up being stripped out, or more interesting paths that the story followed in some earlier draft. Given that a lot of what remains feels like filler, one wonders if there was footage that simply didn’t make the grade. Whatever happened, the result is a pedestrian horror film whose attempt to film the script near the end only confirms its commitment to delivering what we’ve all seen before.