Red Mist Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

Same Old Same Old

Been done before. Its just a very average film. I had little sympathy or interest in any of the characters. Its one of those films that you forget about as soon as it's finished. it's not dire it's just average.

Hmmn Not So Good....

Having seen the director's previous work 'Shrooms' (2007), which was dull, bland and predictable, I didn't necessarily have high hopes for Red Mist aka Freakdog. I did have some hope though, considering the plot sounded pretty good, it has the lovely Arielle Kebbel and Sarah Carter starring, and the trailer looked decent. Whilst 'Red Mist' is a watchable movie and better than Shrooms, it still does a lot of things wrong.

I'll start with the positives with this flick. The production values are solid for a STV movie, despite looking like a TV movie during some of the hospital scenes at the beginning. The movie is filmed in Ireland and is an Irish production, but it set in the US, and it does a good job substituting as a location. The acting is also pretty good also, with Arielle Kebbel giving one of her best performances to date, and Sarah Carter playing a nice, bitchy character. The first death scene in the movie is pretty violent too, and the movie - overall, does start off pretty good for the first 35-40 minutes. Then it all goes wrong...

For the remainder of the movie, we focus on mainly Catherine walking around like a depressed vegetable and then the occasional death scene. The characterization was very poor, and most of the medical students have barely any screen time past the club scene at the beginning, and just show up to be killed. Sarah Carter was totally underused in this movie, along with everybody else, and they even kill off two characters off-screen, which made me think lazy writing. Near the end, accents begin to slip up also, and the ending was predictable as hell. It was also annoying that MyAnna Buring (The Descent) had a pretty useless role in the film as a receptionist/nurse and Stephen Dillane had a useless role too.

Red Mist is a watchable movie and a lot better than Shrooms, but it's still a wasted attempt of solid acting talent (why waste Sarah Carter?) and a rather interesting plot. This is a decent DTV movie with good production values and a good cast, but it has a lot of flaws (poor characterization, bores), so don't expect a lot from this. Still, it was nice to see Arielle and Sarah with more horror credits to their names.

5/10