It was a T.G.I. Friday moment while I was looking at my choices. It was my off day so it was merely a matter of which movie to watch and not ending up having wasted some hundred minutes of my life. I decided to go with William Malone's Parasomnia because:
1) No matter what everyone says, I like FeardotCom (more so than the futile remake "The Pulse", the original of which -Kairo- is said to be a huge inspiration for FeardotCom).
2) No matter what everyone thinks, I like Hills Have Eyes (with its Marilyn Manson cover of Sweet Dreams)
So, although I'd planned to watch another flick, I poured myself a cup of tea, leaned back comfortably and let the impressive opening credits flow (needless to talk about the opening scene which resembles a little too much to the beginning of The Grudge and includes a long forgotten Sean Young). The movie plays a little J. J. Abrams on the viewer with the scattered flashes forward and then flashbacks to create its background story and focus on its characters.
Danny (Dylan Purcell) is an art student who works at a record store and has a best friend, Billy, who spends his free time at the drug wards of an asylum. This Billy character is portrayed through horrible acting. If he is overdosing something, that's the F word and nothing more. A pity since he has an important role in the story as the guy who lets the protagonist know about the villain at first place and basically the one who "fills in the blanks" throughout the film. Danny, while visiting his friend at the hospital, comes across Laura (Cherilyn Wilson); a girl suffering from parasomnia (the Sleeping Beauty syndrome as they metaphorically call it) and is waiting for his man in shining Armani to give her a wake up call. She rarely wakes up (according to the informative doctor at the beginning but wakes up so much throughout the movie that you wonder where he got his degree from) and when she does, it is for an unpredictable period. There's also a psychopath Byron Volpe (Patrick Kilpatrick) who is also a master of hypnosis and claims Laura to be his.
Some stuff later, Danny kidnaps an asleep Laura and takes her home. Then, the movie evolves around a love triangle between a girl who sleeps her life away, a locked up Hannibal Lecter wannabe who looks like a sack-wearing Jason in Friday the 13th Part II and a cupid stricken boy who doesn't give up on his love although his love has a habit of making an annoying "tick tick tick" noise before she tries to kill him. Yea love is like that.
Note that, dear reader, I neither want to be funny nor do I want to make fun of
Parasomnia. You can come out with something like "there's this guy, wearing all black, can dodge bullets in slow motion and connect the real world by phone" but that doesn't take anything from the awesomeness of
The Matrix. Artistically, this movie is quite beautiful with its dream sequences and (H.R.) Giger meets (Odd) Nerdrum designs. However, the actual inspiration is
Zdzislaw Beksinksi, a Polish painter and fantasy artist. Malone holds the rights to his work and uses surreal imagery from his work to create his dream realm (check out some of Beksinski's work
here). The eerie moving eerie creatures and the turning mirrors blend together to depict a disturbing world where Laura is trapped in when she's asleep.
What I don't like about Parasomnia are the slow transition between scenes which keeps decelerating the pace and a really unimpressive villain who is indecisive as to whom he will channel, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger or Pinhead? He starts off as the former and continues as the latter and says something like "This isn't over yet" towards the end which makes me wonder if he'll come back as Krueger. His quoting literature and the like... Nah, it just doesn't work. By slow transition, I mean the scenes feel as if they just don't merge into one another. Parasomnia could have been a fast, fascinating movie but the fact that plot slows down with one scene and then builds up before slowing down with the next scene and so forth makes the viewer as if they are on a bumpy ride.
The chemistry between Purcell and Wilson is just enough to make their relationship believable and their final scene together is quite refined. They are both young and good looking people whose characters are in a somewhat Utopian relationship. This relationship develops rather quickly yet there's a quick explanation to that for those who always want some reasoning on their plate.
If you played
Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh,
Parasomnia is like the live action sequences of this game running continuously. It is dream-like and can be pioneer in creating something like
romantic horror as a genre. However, it fails to compete with the grandeur of
The Cell (
which is a similar, almost parent, movie dealing with the subconscious but, with due respect, is more breathtaking and captivating). Still, my hats off to the visual aspect of Parasomnia and I should admit that it is a welcoming change in the world of stereotypical, formulaic horror.
Well, we all need change now and then...
Oh by no means did I want to debate you either, I don't want you to think that either! Since the ones perspective, likes, and dislikes, of Cinema are, as you stated, a matter of personal taste, usually grounded in ones own environment, up-bringing, culture, education, so there really isn't much to debate! :) Your opinion of Blair Witch as an "amazing low-budget film", is the perfect example of just that. As I on the other hand, felt that film was a one trick pony, gimmicky, and an amazing low-budget piece of rubbish, that added nothing in terms of Artistic value to the Artform. lol! I was more just engaging in healthy discussion of, statements of comparison, rather than, statements of taste. As I think each film is better served when put into the proper context, and considered fairly. I hope you'll allow me to explain... The "parent movie" and the "we saw The Cell so we thought we could" statements, appeared to be statements of fact, suggesting the Writer/Director was influenced by The Cell, or made a spin-off of The Cell . When in fact that would be impossible, since "The Cell" (2000) is the child of this Director's and another Writer's hour long tele-film for NBC in 1997. (which I hope Universal releases on DVD one day) Therefore, if one had to draw comparisons in the subject matter perhaps a statement more along the line of , it is a sister film to the Director's tele-film Sleepwalkers and it's spin-off The Cell, would be a more accurate statement. (it's just a suggestion, and I thought you might not want to appear ill-informed.) The "grandeur and breathtaking" comparison, Since those two terms are usually only used to describe what we see visually, It appeared as though you were comparing the visuals of the two films, and since Visual FX and Production Design are extremely expensive, (they took up almost 75% of the budget of my little 15,000 short film) it's of course completely unfair not to point out why it can't visually compete with the breath-taking visuals of The Cell, since you mentioned it. According to IMDB "the Cell" had like 180+ Artists in it's Art and FX departments, working to make that film Grandeur and Breathtaking, Parasomnia on the other hand, list a measly 19 people in its Art and FX departments combined, with only four of them being digital FX artist's, one being the filmmaker himself! (It must have taken them FOREVER to do, I'd be interested in knowing when they started the film) Therefore, I have to imagine, (and I'm sure you'll agree, having said you felt the film was visually beautiful), that seeing what this filmmaker created on his tiny little budget, had he had the same budget as The Cell, the two films would not only compete, but the guy would be a seriously fascinating force to be reckoned with. As for the serial Killer – here I wasn't looking to debate either, just chit-chat, I just thought it was interesting how very different our interpretations were. I'm a student filmmaker, and so I'm always curious when people say something doesn't work for them, how one could make it work, so I was just prodding you. lol! .. Lastly, one always hopes Artist's read other peoples comments on their work, and possibly even make a difference in their work, and they probably do when they are young and green, but Malone is one of the Master's Of Horror guys and has also been one of the most active in other areas of the genre besides filmmaking, so he's a pretty well known all around the genre, so I seriously doubt he cares or has time to read what some student wannabe filmmaker thinks about his film.. But then again we fill the seats in theater also , so I hope so.
Re: seeing it on the tiny little screen – I haven't seen Dorothy, so I don't know what sort of film it is to compare the feeling of two on the small screen. But I just meant that, unlike the Texas Chainsaw Remake and other now formulaic slashers and ghost stories, which are usually just character driven, and never really all that visually artistic. This film's subject matter naturally relies very heavily on the visuals for everything, - to set the tone, mood, atmosphere, tell the story, etc. And, because it is so visually driven, especially the dream worlds, when projected larger than life, and with sound blaring in your ears, those visuals seem to grab you and swallow you up, which can give you the feeling that you are actually in the films world with the characters. (at least I did) Which of course will color the way one feels about a film, so I hope you get to experience it larger than life one day, or at least on a super big widescreen, when It comes out on DVD, that's all I meant. ...Do you think they will play this in the theater in Turkey? And Thank you for the welcome, and responding to my comment, as you gave me some ideas of how I can improve my review!