Student Danielle (Alanna Chisholm) has just left a mental institution where she was treated for paranoid schizophrenia. Her sister Anna (Lauren Roy) has found some rooms in a Victorian era building for her.
As literature and cinema have told us, houses of this age aren't places one should live in, especially when one is as fragile as Danielle's still is. Soon enough, the expected amount of bad things starts too happen, beginning with falling objects and soon culminating in the appearance of a strange cloud of smoke in Danielle's bedroom. The cloud leads Danielle to a secret room, where she finds a wax cylinder made for phonographic recording and a music box.
Anna is afraid Danielle's drifting off into her illness again, but decides out of a feeling of guilt to just watch over her sister and wait.
A little research on the Net leads the sister to a mesmerist, a certain Doctor Zymytryk, who is rumored to have performed a macabre experiment in Danielle's rooms by hypnotizing and then slowly killing a child murderer, burying the man's spirit together with his body somewhere.
Danielle's behavior grows increasingly more erratic. She develops an appetite for cat food and begins to build a strange contraption out of a chair. Is she possessed by an insane spirit or is it "just" her paranoia again?
I am usually pretty hard on modern micro-budget shot on digital horror movies. Alas this has less to do with my naturally mean disposition than with most of those pictures' complete lack of quality.
As the fact that I liked The Chair quite a bit demonstrates, I am not all that difficult too please. If more micro-budget film-makers would do like Brett Sullivan did here, there would be a lot less gnashing of teeth in my living room. So, you may ask yourself breathlessly, what is it that makes The Chair so adequate for houseinrlyeh's sophisticated taste?
The answer lies mostly in the things the film doesn't do wrong: There is no overabundance of bad gore effects that never manage to distract from atrocious acting or a bad script full of plot holes. They just aren't necessary with actors who aren't brilliant, but solid enough to work for their roles or a script that actually makes enough sense to avoid any annoyance.
The script even uses suspense quite effectively. Also, it respects its audience's intelligence enough not to explain each bit of subtext, or to try and sell every obvious thing as a big surprise.
My only problem with The Chair is a problem that haunts every movie shot on digital cameras - it just doesn't look as good as it would shot on film. Sullivan at least has the good taste not to use the blue and gray color filters I have come to loathe.
All in all, The Chair probably won't rock your world, but it is a nice enough film if you like the horror genre enough to even read this.
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4 comments:
I guess you should only expect so much imagination out of a movie that is so creatively named "The Chair".
It may seem kind of shallow, but I'd be more tempted to check out "Scream... and Die!" based on the name alone.
The Chair is at least the best chair-oriented horror film I know.
Of course, its main rival is The Devil's Chair, whose only good part is the title.
Speaking of titles, I should probably look for The Killer Must Kill Again, and Again, and Again. Seems to be about killing.
The Killer Must Kill Again, and Again, and Again, eh? But only that many times? Seems very specific.
There's only so much time in a single film, I suppose.
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