Red Mist

source: Freakdog

I thought Red Mist aka Freakdog was a great movie!! Paddy Breathnach is one of the few horror directors out there today that will take a chance. While watching this movie the thoughts of the 70's killer coma patient movie Patrick kept popping into my head but but the end of Red Mist I totally forgot about whats-his-name. If your not a Horror Nazi you will love this movie. Give it a chance.....I would have rather seen this in the theaters than any of the pg-13 drivel that Hollywood is putting out. In my opinion there's not enough good hospital horror these days and Red Mist is a most welcome addition to the genre. Paddy Breathnach is tops on my list.

Spoilers Freak Dog is about a group of assholes who party on stolen pharmacy meds and murder a dangerous mentally deranged necrophilliac. Now in a coma, the man gets his revenge by possessing thief bodies and killing them slasher-style. This movie is an example of how a talented cast and fun concept can be ruined by inept direction and a poor script. Not even the best actress could sell "this guy is killing people by possessing our bodies." to a cop. The problem is the characters keep trying to convince people of the ludicrous plot line, rather than actively try to stop the killer. Bad writing. The characters do stupid, cruel things, and keep doing them. For instance, after Cat administers a miracle drug on Kenneth, he nearly dies. So of course the next day she goes back does it again! WTF? Sadly, this is a talented group of actors, including Andrew Lee Potts and Sarah Carter. They do their best with the nasty unbelievable characters they are given. In his brief appearance Potts steals the show, he manages to be creepy and a little sympathetic. It's too bad all the little nuances of his performance don't echo through this movie. Carter always enhances those around her, (check out the otherwise terrible Falling Skies) and she is tragically misused. Overall, this script needed a rewrite that allowed the actors freedom to do their job and act. How great would it have been to have each actor do their own impersonation of Freak Dog? Instead it's spends way too much time trying to explain it's pseudo-science. The only saving grace in the script is that at least the people who shouldn't believe the plot, don't. Another distracting element, is that most of the cast is European, and it's clearly shot in Europe. Yet too much effort is made to make us think it's set in the US.

Freakdog is set at Fort Haven County General Hospital where several trainee Doctor's decide to have a party, while there slightly retarded hospital janitor Kenneth Chisum (Andrew Lee Potts) turns up & when he is called names & thrown out he mentions the drugs that Sean (Martin Compston) stole from the hospital pharmacy that everyone has been getting high on. Worried Kenneth will tell he is invited to the party & is stuffed full of drugs & alcohol which causes him to have an epileptic seizure, while arguing whether to save Kenneth or not he suffers brain damage & goes into a deep coma. While Sean wants Kenneth to die Catherine (Arielle Kebbel) doesn't & the group reach the compromise of dumping Kenneth outside ER. In a deep coma Catherine feels guilty & tries to help Kenneth by injecting him with experimental drugs which raise his brain activity to the extent Kenneth can possess other people which he uses to extract his revenge on those who left for dead in a coma... Much more commonly known under the title Red Mist this English production was directed by Paddy Breathnach & could be looked as a modern updating of the classic Australian film Patrick (1978) with it's main villain in a coma but there's a bit of I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) here as well as a bunch of teens who try to cover a terrible accident up for their own personal selfish reasons are killed off one by one. I enjoyed Freakdog much more than I thought I would, at just over 80 odd minutes it's fairly short but I have to say that the pace is quite sedate with the script taking the time to build the story & character's & the time invested is worth it. I liked the idea of a comatose killer who can possess people & use them to kill, setting people up to take the blame & even possess those he wants to kill & have them commit suicide, the kills are good & the film is surprisingly engaging. However the cast of character's are a little thin, all the medical students are portrayed as selfish unlikable people which makes it hard to sympathise with them when they get killed, the one exception is Catherine who show's just enough guilt & turmoil for us to relate to her & the situation she was in. I suppose what it boils down to is that Freakdog is just another teen slasher but there's enough about it to lift it from the usual low budget dross out there, the story, character's & kills are all better than expected although the ending is a little ambiguous which may irritate some. The film looks very slick, the super white & clean lines of the hospital location is a nice change from the usual dark & dank horror film settings. There are some good kills here, a woman has her head based in a car door, a man has acid pured down his throat, a woman mutilates herself by cutting herself with a shard of glass & there's a cool & satisfying kill in which a man has a kitchen knife stuck through his throat with blood gushing consequences. Although very clean & stylish looking there's not much tension here & the scares are minimal, I guess Freakdog is more of a horror thriller than an all out horror film. With a supposed budget of about $3,000,000 this is set entirely in the US but was filmed entirely in Belfast in Northern Ireland. The acting is pretty good actually, the lead Arielle Kebbel is super hot & a decent actress too. Freakdog is a much better film than I expected, the only thing that holds it back is a slowish pace at times & too many unlikable character's which means when the killing starts it's hard to really care. However it's stylish & the story, acting & kills are good. Better than average & better than many low budget horror films out there.

What is it with some people, the problem this movie had is that many people broke it down. But the movie already had one problem, the title. Is it Freakdog or is it Red Mist. Anyhow don't be bothered by it. This is another film made by the director of Schroom, one that was spitted out by the creeps and freaks. Being a geek myself I watched without prejudice Red Mist. The storyline is good and easy to follow. The killings that appear are mostly done off camera except the one on the stairs which is for me the best one and the goriest one. By filming most killings not in front of the camera and not having any nudity but still having his 18 logo this is were this film fails. By having the famous 18 logo people expect vicious killings. But no. The red stuff flows but always when the killings have happened.The movie never bored me and the plot is really nice. I would not recommend it to the hard core horror freaks but to those who like a good suspense with a little horror twist. I rather have given it a 15 logo.

Irish film-maker Paddy Breathnach bored me to tears with the asinine drivel that was Shrooms, but being the reasonable fellow that I am, I was willing to give the guy a second chance at impressing me with his next movie, Red Mist AKA Freakdog (the fact that the back of the DVD showed hottie Arielle Kebbel in her undies had nothing to do with my decision—Scout's honour!). Although this film isn't as soporific as Breathnach's earlier fungi-flavoured flop, at least delivering a few reasonable performances, it's still an ultimately unimpressive effort, with a derivative narrative that borrows heavily from several other horrors (most notably 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' and 'Patrick'), a thoroughly unlikable group of extremely clichéd characters, and a surprising lack of gore given the nasty ways in which the characters meet their fates (a juicy knife-in-the-throat aside, Breathnach misses every opportunity to really gross out his audience). Oh, and the 'Kebbel in her scanties' scene lasts for all of 10 seconds... grrrrr!

In the past years, writers of Horror screenplay have really had to adjust to the new standards set by progress. The good ol' Teen Slashers are still good, but not groundbreaking, and the audience have become bored with them (and rightfully so, how many films with the same story and settings can we take? Even the characters are the same but with different names!) So some attempted to be groundbreaking by being graphic and sadistic (like Hostel), some being ironically smart (like Cabin in the Woods) and some by being plain sick (like Human Centipede). However, in Red Mist, writer Spence Wright has managed to combine some familiar elements in a never before seen way (at least by me). Wright took the good ol' fashioned "prank gone wrong" scenario (like in Tamara or Sorority Row) and combine it with a touch of the supernatural, as the victim of the prank is locked in a coma but has out-of-body experiences during which he takes possession of people and make them murder the ones who were involved in the prank. This was, in my opinion, a refreshingly original idea. As for the characters, the "rules" remained pretty much intact. There's the selfish bastard who passionately and roughly convinces the rest not to tell anyone what happened so they don't destroy their (and mostly his) future. The're the good guy who has a thing with the main protagonist, he just gets carried away and allows himself to be convinced by the selfish bastard. There's the "princess" who doesn't want her daddy to find out, the cold "goth bitch" who couldn't care less, and the straight A geek girl who panics. And of course there's the protagonist, representing sort of a mixed up combination of all of the above. Classic, nothing new here. Acting was pretty good. In my opinion, the film was really aching for a twist, a clever surprise to "seal the deal" and really make Red Mist one of the best. Unfortunately, there were no surprises. The final scene was a little vague and not so easy to understand, the entire ending felt a little anticlimactic. That's another challenge Horror screenwriters will have to learn to deal with - learning how to make climactic endings again. Having our minds blown away might be a lot to ask for, but it's part of the makings of a truly good Horror film. All in all, Red Mist (btw I can't understand why they've chosen that name, should have stuck with Freakdog) was pretty original in its own way, and fun to watch. I would gladly recommend it to Horror fans who'd like to see something "newish".

After inadvertently putting a young man into a coma, a doctor tries to resuscitate him with a powerful new drug being tested at the hospital only for his murderous spirit to possess passers-by and kill them one-by-one for putting him there. This one managed to be quite enjoyable even if nothing really sticks out afterward. The fact that this is based so much on a familiar, over-done plot-point of having the perpetrator seek revenge by body-hopping from one person to another going after the ones who placed him there is a tired, overdone cliché that really seems quite ludicrous the way it's presented here as being done through the tell-tale sign of a bloody nose after-the-fact, which manages to feel quite lame and ludicrous as yo be the overall source of the possession it really feels quite shorthanded. Though it does manage to have a rather credible back-story in the attempt to tie it in with the out-of-body experience from the experimental drug treatment, the fact that it's never explicitly stated how it's possible to do that makes for a really lame-duck explanation. As well, there's very little thought put into the film's final twist in terms of connecting it to explaining how the various crimes were committed, as this one manages to attempt something interesting in the final minutes only to undermine everything that's happened beforehand with the story to wrap everything up in how it played out, so in the end re-writes itself out of it's original storyline and produces a huge gap in logic rather easily. That said, there's still some good stuff here in the brutal deaths doled out which are quite fun and enjoyable in how shocking and nasty they get, as well as the concept of how it does these acts come about. Though it goes for mere shock value instead of playing about with suspense in these cases, it does work on the brutality stakes more than the actual scare factor. As well, the final matter of dealing with the body is quite ingenious and really unique, looking for a new way to actually deal with the threat that's never been done before and manage to work itself into the story rather nicely, in spite of the problems it perceived into the storyline. These made the film watchable and enjoyable, but it does have a few problems. Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, Brief Nudity and heavy drug use.

This is a good effort - much better than other reviewers have suggested. As usual, as soon as reviewers are even slightly disappointed they suffer from a knee-jerk reaction and start to proclaim decent films as "the worst ever". Time to put things straight... The director's previous horror effort, 'Shrooms',was a great disappointment to me - many had bigged it up but I found myself fairly unmoved throughout. This, however, is much better. It comes across as a combo of 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' and the Australian 'Carrie' rip-off from the 70s, 'Patrick'. Character development could be better in some cases and some characters might have benefited the story by sticking around longer than they did. Occasionally we suffer from trite dialogue, too. However, it has pace, decent production values and an interesting cast made up of British, American, Canadian and European actors, all of whom acquit themselves well. They all have admirable track records prior to this film, too. Overall, an involving, entertaining film - and nice to see Michael Jibson, star of the West End stage show 'Our House: The Madness Musical', get another cinematic outing - I enjoyed him alongside Statham in 'The Bank Job', too. Best horror film ever? No, but the best British film pretending to be American that I can recall seeing in a long time, and the best slasher-ish film I've seen in absolutely ages. Don't be put of by the doom-mongers - this is worth a watch.

It always strikes me as quite remarkable that med students in horror films are even dumber than the average adolescent horror movie characters. I mean, these people are supposed to represent our doctors and scientists of tomorrow, yet when confronted with a potentially perilous situation, they take the absolute worst decisions of all. Basically speaking, "Red Mist" is another umpteenth variation on the 'I know what you did last Summer' slasher theme. In other words, a bunch of young people do something incredibly stupid that results in the death of an innocent person, but in order to save their own careers/reputations, the make a pact to keep it secret. The events naturally come back to haunt them. The culprits who were immediately prepared to ditch the dead guy usually die first and most painfully. The sole member of the group with a bit of a conscious, usually the one who insists at first on calling the police, still has a slight chance of survival. Nothing new or innovative there, as "Red Mist" revolves on a band of dim-witted med students that go out partying with drugs that they have stolen from the hospital pharmacy and cause for the mentally retarded morgue assistant Kenneth to OD into an epileptic attack and subsequently a coma. The whole group is perfectly happy with Kenneth's "permanent vegetative state", as this prevents him from talking about what really happened, but the celestial Catherine is overrun by feelings of guilt and remorse. To help poor Kenneth and bring him out of the coma, she secretly experiments upon him with a new type of drug. The treatment doesn't have the wanted effect, however, as it causes "out of the body" episodes during which Kenneth possess the bodies of random people and uses them to extract revenge on those who wronged him! Indeed, what we're dealing with here is a genuine amalgamation of "I Know what you did last Summer" and the obscure Aussie shocker "Patrick". The plot isn't very original, but even more troublesome is that "Red Mist" doesn't distinguish itself from the overload of contemporary horror films in terms of gore, atmosphere or suspense, neither. The film is dull and slow-paced, with unmemorable murders and clichéd situations. The attempts to bring additional depth and plot twists are well-intended but completely miss their effect (like the scene where Catherine suddenly awakes in a body bag in the middle of the woods) due to the overall predictability of the concept. The acting performances are decent, especially from Arielle Kebbel and Andrew Lee Potts, but these freshly faced twenty-something hunks and babes seriously don't look like future doctors or surgeons. This film is a slight improvement over "Shrooms" for director Paddy Breatnach, as that film was completely incoherent and messy, but it still isn't solid horror like it ought to be.