The Redsin Tower (2006)

Kim (Bethany Newell) has just dumped her unstable boyfriend Mitch (Perry Tiberio) who isn’t taking it very well (see “unstable”). Her goth friend Becky (Jessica Kennedy) on the other hand is taking these news particularly well and decides to drag Kim to a party to distract her from her woes. Alas, Mitch gets wind of the party and calls in the police to shut it down before it has even begun. Kim, Beth, and a couple of their peers decide to go and make their own damn party right in their city’s most haunted building: the titular Redsin Tower.

That’ll turn out to be a very unfortunate decision. Not only does Mitch manage to follow them there too, and has upgraded his weaponry from telephone to axe and gun, there’s also the little matter of the Tower actually being haunted by the remnants of rather depraved alchemical experiments. And these aren’t polite spirits either, so the night will end pretty badly for most everyone involved who isn’t already dead (and most of those guys and gals don’t fare too well, either, come to think of it).

This one was clearly an attempt of Fred Vogel/Toe Tag Pictures to get away from the faux snuff style of the August Underground movies and make something more akin to a traditional horror film. In part The Redsin Tower is an obvious homage to films like Night of the Demons and the Lamberto Bava Demoni films, with some clear call-backs particularly to the former film. But because this isn’t made for anything anyone could ever confuse for the mass market, things become a bit nastier and a bit more unpleasant than a film made for major consumption could get away with. Not – to my surprise – with the tiresome gesture of “breaking taboos” but rather with the air of people using the freedom making films for little money and no oversight by serious adults or that most horrifying of all monsters, men in suits, affords them to make their film a smidgen more grubby and a little more nasty than they otherwise probably could. It’s good healthy fun, if you ask me, depending on one’s conception of what’s healthy or fun.

The gore and the creature design is pretty great, and while that’s certainly not the reputation Vogel’s films have, he uses them with a degree of restraint, clearly enjoying showing the icky stuff but not lingering so excessively it could become boring. That’s an approach fitting the film’s generally grubby aesthetics well, with actors that look and sound like actual young people – and whose characters act in a more believable way as usual in horror movies before the actual horror starts – and lots of shots of very dark, very dirty rooms. That’s a purposeful use of darkness though, not incompetence (incompetently shot films aren’t edited as well as this one is), a clear attempt at giving the film a realistic feel that’ll make the outbreak of the supernatural more effective and un-natural. This also keeps the film far away from being too much of a nostalgia trip for 80s demon slaughter horror.


Unfortunately, the film does have one big weakness: while I do appreciate its efforts at being more naturalistic than typical of its sub-genre, its love for the quotidian does drag The Redsin Tower’s pacing right down, leaving it very top heavy, with nothing even mildly horrific happening until about the hour mark, when soon all hell breaks loose upon the characters. I do believe the film could have lost about twenty minutes of its first hour without actually losing anything. However, once said hell does break loose, things actually become great enough I find myself okay with the slow first two thirds. It’s certainly not something everyone will agree with me on, but when has it not been such?