Starting a few years ago, there has been a big resurgence in horror, and a lot of higher budget straight to video stuff. Between the 8 Films to Die For, After Dark Horrorfest, and the Masters of Horror Series, it’s been pretty difficult to pick out what straight to video horror is good, and what’s bad. I’ve seen most of the Masters of Horror series, and most of them suck. I’ve seen a few of the After Dark Horrorfest films as well, and nothing stood out. This film was part of the After Dark Horrorfest in 2007 and was recommended to me, and the idea of it seemed interesting enough, so I gave it a shot. Although I love the attention that horror films have been getting lately, I’m nervous of saturating the market with shitty titles that will turn a profit. Either way, I’m watching them, which I’m guessing is all they are concerned about.

I know these guys look like rejects from The Matrix, but they, uhh, wait, they might actually be rejects from The Matrix.

Ian Stone, played by Mike Vogel, is a hockey player in college. He is driving his girlfriend, played by Christina Cole,  to her house when he sees a figure in the middle of the road. He goes to help whatever it is, and it kills him. He then wakes up in an office, a few years later. He tries to remember things about his hockey team with his new, different girlfriend, played by Jaime Murray, and he is no longer in the yearbook. The next day a strange man says someone is after Ian, and then that man is killed. He goes home to tell his girlfriend, and her arm turns to some sort of demon arm and she kills him. He then wakes up a few years later…starting to see a pattern? Well, it turns out that Ian is being hunted by beings known as “Harvesters” that steal the fear that someone releases right before they reach a violent death. Ian apparently used to be a Harvester but somehow changed his destiny and is involved in a game set up by the rest of the Harvesters where he continuously gets killed after the fear is sucked out of him. Eventually Ian returns to his true Harvester form and kills everyone who is hunting him, and he is able to go back into his past and relive things in a much better way with his original girlfriend.

Haha, it looks like she’s killing him with her boner knife slicer thing.

This film suffers from a serious case of Clive Barker Syndrome. What is Clive Barker Syndrome, you might ask? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s when a movie is interesting and you are following it and are interested in what happens, then halfway through some sort of crazy shit starts happening that doesn’t really make much sense, and you lose interest in anything that happens to the main character because it’s so crazy. Don’t get me wrong, Clive Barker Syndrome isn’t always a bad thing, and in fact, some movies are successful with these twists, but unfortunately for Ian Stone, it just doesn’t pay off. I feel like someone saw Groundhog Day and thought it would be cool to make it a horror movie, and then halfway through filming they realized they needed some sort of reasons for what was happening. I guess if you’re a fan of Clive Barker and demons, you might be interested in this movie, but to everyone else, FUCKING SKIP IT.

Wolfman Moon Scale