Living Death
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Movie Reviews of Living Death
Movie Review: Pretty good
Summary: 4 Stars
I purchased this movie merely to see one of the actors in it. I was not expecting much when I watched it, but was pleasantly surprised. It was interesting and certainly worth watching IMO. I was also happy with the 'making of' featurette.
It certainly had its unrealistic aspects, but most horror/thrillers do.
Movie Review: Swanson's Hungry man dinners
Summary: 3 Stars
Living Death: 5 out of 10: If you ever wondered what Body Heat 2 would look like if remade this year and having Kathleen Turner reprising her original role this movie may clue one in? Kristy Swanson hasn't spent much time on the big screen since the mid-nineties and she looks like she has been eating a lot of her namesakes Hungry Man dinners. Don't get me wrong she is attractive as a full-figured woman it simply was a bit disconcerting after not seeing her for a dozen years or so. She certainly hasn't spent that time fine tuning her thespian craft however as she is defiantly the acting weak point in this little drama.
The plot has Shannon Tweed/ Tim Matheson written all over it. Abusive do nothing playboy husband is killed by suffering wife and his best friend/lawyer who is now her lover. Only problem is that they choose a poison that if given in the wrong dose only causes the person to appear dead. D'oh.
He comes back and gets revenge on everyone who wronged him. Sounds like your very standard erotic thriller except it isn't.
There is no nudity and virtually no sex. The only bondage is the decidedly non-erotic leg breaking kind. This is a straight up horror movie and it puts the pedal to the metal.
Main lead Greg Byrk captures our evil protagonist's hedonism perfectly. (The scene where he snorts coke while playing videogames is a classic.) The revenge isn't fair or just it is bloody and cruel.
This creates a great vibe in the film as the only guy to root for is a remarkably unlikable rogue. In fact the film has virtually not one likable hero style character giving an almost Bad Santa feel to the proceedings.
The film picks up the pace about halfway through and never lets go. Not a great film or a genre classic by any means but certainly an entertaining horror film.
Movie Review: I've seen worse...
Summary: 3 Stars
I watched this last night. It's not as bad as I might have thought. It actually has a somewhat interesting plot. The sound quality stinks though, turn it up high enough to hear the dialogue and the "music" (such as it is) is overwhelmingly loud and blasts you away.
Caddish rich-heir-from-Daddy husband, sexy wife (yum, great kisser) and her lover, his best friend. Wife and lover off the cad with blowfish-poison. Only he doesn't die, he is paralyzed like dead but still sees and hears everything but can't move a muscle ("Living Death"). He wakes up on the autopsy table and goes on a revengefest.
A medieval torture stretching rack features twice in this horror-genre flick. Daddy had a hobby, a fully equipped attic medieval dungeon that hubby, and implicitly his wife, use for fun and games. The movie starts with yon cad entertaining a lady friend up there with some erotic moderate stretching on a large angled rack (severe unpadded heavy iron manacles, ouch). Things go awry when his wife surprises them. Startled, he leans too hard on the lever and damages the rackee.
One gets an impression of the rack's dismembering strength but pictures of the mechanism are unpersuasive, just closeups of gears meshing and chains and ropes tightening. The rack figures again at the end of the movie in the vengeancefest, this time as a torture and execution means. No erotic BDSM this time, but pain and dismemberment. The scene suggests the horror of the real thing beyond erotica when it was used for torture and punishment, much less execution.
Anyway, I've seen worse horror-genre flicks. If you're a rack aficionado it's worth a look.
Movie Review: Kristy Swanson returns to horror.
Summary: 3 Stars
Living Death (Erin Berry, 2006)
Surprisingly, a great deal less stupid than I figured it would be, with really good acting for a straight-to-video release and a plot that, while not terribly accurate in some of its particulars, was at least halfway original and more than halfway interesting.
Elizabeth (Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Kristy Swanson) and Victor (Saw V's Greg Bryk) Harris are unhappily married. Victor is a sadistic, infantile playboy, and Elizabeth is just kind of waiting around until he finally manages to kill himself and she inherits his vast estate. She also happens to be romantically involved with Roman (Lars and the Real Girl's Joshua Peace), Victor's best friend and lawyer. The two come up with a plan to get rid of Victor without anyone knowing, but the poison they end up using simply puts Victor into a coma, able to see, hear, and feel everything that's going on around him, but unable to telegraph to the outside world that this is the case. (Fans of The Serpent and the Rainbow or the books of Wade Davis know exactly what's going on here.)
Yeah, it's your basic thriller, but with a few fun twists thrown in and some really engaging, if repugnant, characters. Compared to a lot of low budget horror/thrillers I've seen in January, Living Death is Oscar material. (It's not, of course. Everything's relative.) But even looked at more empirically, it's fun, it's watchable, it's perfect for a rainy night when you've got nothing better to do. ***
Movie Review: Living Death
Summary: 3 Stars
Kristy Swanson stars as the wife of a sadistic millionaire who plots to kill her husband with the help of the family lawyer. Their attempt to poison him fails, and he awakens in the morgue with his mind set on revenge. LIVING DEATH sells itself on being just another Torture Porn entry in a long line of HOSTEL imitators, but it plays out like any other average revenge thriller where money is always the motive. The torture devices laid out in the opening act are not revisited until the final scene, although there are scattered kills throughout the remainder of the run time that offer a decent amount of bloodshed. What really takes away from the film is the uneven tone, where the otherwise serious plot is broken up by unnecessary bits of slapstick in the morgue. LIVING DEATH may not break any new ground, but one can do much worse when it comes to the murder for money theme.
-Carl Manes
I Like Horror Movies
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