Gruesome

2006

Horror

U.S.A.

Cinemavault Releasing International

Madman Entertainment

R4 DVD

Reviewer: Bob Estreich

Horror is a cheap way for beginning filmmakers to get started in the industry. Unfortunately many producers go for rough scripts, cheap outdoor sets and low cost new actors in an attempt to make best use of their limited budget, and sometimes a good film is let down by these shortcuts. Gruesome shows some of these problems.

ClaIre finishes her night job at the local store, and is picked up by the rather disturbing Duke instead of her boyfriend Jimmy. He drops her off at home, then returns and brutally slaughters her. She wakes up the next day and assumes it has all been a nightmare. Her boyfriend picks her up as usual and all appears to be normal, but she is still shaken up from her nightmare. That evening it starts again. The locked bathroom door mysteriously opens itself. She hears voices in the basement. Later that evening she imagines someone may be in the bathroom while she is in the shower. It is a quiet night at work and when she drifts off to sleep she has flashes of someone running through the woods, escaping from …what? Emerging from one episode of sleep, she sees in the security monitor a man hiding behind one of the fixtures – Duke. She hits the alarm. He attacks her, but escapes when the Police arrive.

The security camera footage, however, doesn’t show him. It shows Claire waking up from a sleep, then apparently having a fight with herself. The police officer knows Duke – he shot and killed him the previous week. Duke had a cut up body in the back of his truck.

She nods off to sleep in the police car as it takes her home, but wakes up in her boyfriend’s truck – with Duke. He tells Claire that “the whole world is made up – the only thing that is real is what you feel – when I cut your head off.” And the nightmare starts again.

And the next day she is back at the store again when she wakes up, and the first day starts to repeat itself again. How can Claire break the cycle and stop her murder repeating itself over and over?

She feels there may be some clue at Duke’s home, so she and Jimmy go there to investigate. Duke is there, apparently alive and well, and he kills Jimmy. She rings the police, but the sheriff tells her ominously “I can’t tell you what’s going on, but you’ll find out soon enough”.

Claire returns home, but Duke is now waiting there. She flees, and tries to find out more about Duke in the newspaper clippings in the local library. What she finds is even worse than she could imagine.

Lauren Lewis as Claire is a good actress with a lot of potential, but she isn’t given much to work with in the script. It just doesn’t allow her to be anything more than a cute girl caught up in something she doesn’t understand. This is fair enough – the story only becomes clear at the end of the film – but the contradictory script does make the film hard to follow until the end. She does the best she can with what she has.

In spite of the script it is a tense gripping story, a sort of Groundhog Day with killers, that kept me watching until the story fell into place. At least those responsible for the film didn’t fall into that other major trap for beginners, substituting splatter for plot.

Although my feelings are still mixed about the film, I feel it’s a good enough horror show to stay on my shelf for a while.

This review will appear in Volume 2 No.3 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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