Long Time Dead (2002)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Horror movies like this one really drive me crazy, because it sounds good, the previews are great, and when you sit down to watch it you find that the characters are so unbelievably stupid, that the film has no credibility what-so-ever. What happens when eight friends at a party get tired of drinking? Just like anyone else, they wind up going into a store room and using a Ouija board to contact the dead. In their ignorance, they forget to close the portal to the other side, and a demon escapes intent on hunting them all down. Las Vegas's Marsha Thomason stars and pretends to be some kind of spiritual expert, when in reality she doesn't know a thing. She is this whiny, annoying, know-it-all who I couldn't wait to see get her head chopped off. The rest of the cast isn't much better, as most of them just blindly follow her lead. To avoid this demon's rage, what do they all decide to do? Stick together in an old house, a good idea, but of course they can't stay together in a room forever, and that's when the demon starts picking them off one by one, in textbook slasher fashion. When you have a ridiculous story, combined with no background information, and a cast of characters that makes the cast of Duck Dynasty seem smart, what you get is a film that is beyond terrible. If there was some humor or even a break from the main story, maybe parts of Long Time Dead wouldn't have been so bad, but this film is pure garbage from the drunken night out to the bloody end.

Saw this when it was released and I didn't think all that much of it. Thought it was quite poor. I hadn't seen it since, until now and I didn't find it as bad as I last remembered. However there are no pretensions that it's your typical run-of-the-mill, forgettable little post-scream British horror flick outing. Almost like a dark supernatural slasher, as a evil entity (Djinn - fire spirit) possesses a human body and goes about killing the college friends who were involved in summoning it through a Ouija board. That who it possess is kept hidden until the film's climax, as red herrings are thrown up and back-stories are revealed. The main problem I had with it were the characters themselves… quite an unlikeable, bland and indistinguishable bunch of players. Surprisingly the ones which might have seem important in some shape to carry it (the few sympathetic turns with some sensibility) were killed off early and this actually made it unpredictable it what order they would dwindle down to. The typical traits are there; false build ups, reckless decisions, surprising revelations to keep the story moving, roaming shadows, distracting noises, characters finding out the truth to only be killed, ghastly shocks with flowing blood, the killer POV shots and a cheap lasting jolt to close up shop. Director / co-writer Marcus Adams' escalates some suspenseful frights and paces it well enough, but still its slick and flashy techniques are systematically vanilla. Special effects are efficient (sped up visuals and CGI) and the simmering score heightens the danger with its heart-racing cues. The performances are okay focusing on a hip young British cast (Hass' the exception) with the ladies (Marsha Thomason, Lara Bellmount and Melanie Gutteridge) standing head over heals over the boys (Lukas Hass, Ale Newman, Joe Absolom, James Hillier and Mel Raido).

This movie seems to owe a huge debt to Final Destination, in that the film is primarily about horrible fate hunting down a group of teens one-by-one.I found the characters even more cardboard-cutout than those in F.D. Main difference is that here the threat is personified, but the boogity stays so undeveloped that this is a weakness. The father should have been developed quite a bit more, and the landlord could have been a very interesting pivot point for the story, instead of serving merely as a red herring or distraction.The fact that the ending was actually an ending, rather than a Hollywood sequel-tease was nice, however.Watchable, but only just. If, however, you go all weak-kneed over mush-moufed British accents, you might like it more than I did.

There was a point - as the film was starting - that I felt that maybe I had had low and unjustified expectations of this film over the last couple of years: forget the bad reviews and box-office sales at the time of its release, and instead concentrate on the actual film itself. After pressing play on the VHS, this rather confused and quite frankly stupid reason of thought was quickly diminished after the first ten minutes or so had passed by.I won't go into the story much (it does exactly what it says on the tin, except it doesn't scare or entertain) as there isn't that much of a story, and what there is of it feels like a contrived mess that looks like it was thought up by an arrogant 15 year-old who thinks they're a genius (but they're NOT). Most of the film seems to consist of each character walking about in the dark for a bit, and then getting killed. No real scares to speak of, although the crap-looking student nightclub was a bit of a fright I can tell you.