An Exercise In Nonsense

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

SpoilersFreak 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.

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!

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.