Long Time Dead



The British film industry seems to go through different phases in regards to the kinds of movie they’re meant to be known for making. For a while we were all about ‘period dramas’ with pretty and vacant women go through personal odysseys full of dashing men and heaving bosoms in order to eventually find true happiness with the man of their dreams who they didn’t like at first but turned out to be really smashing chaps. Then we were known for making films about cheeky cockney gangsters who while were breaking the law and breaking people’s fingers and doing lots of drugs, they were a loveable lot. Right now I’m not entirely sure what we’re meant to be known for, maybe that’s a good thing, maybe that means that we’re actually creating a more diverse and varied selection of films for the viewers’ digestion. Sure we’re never going to create a ‘second Hollywood’, well at least I hope not, perhaps we are capable of more than well spoken gents talking to women in corsets, and Londoners smashing each other’s brains out with baseball bats and saying stuff like “fack orf ye’ bahstid”. One thing’s for sure, if Hollywood can produce formulaic mindless teen horror movies with zero characteristics and cheap scares, and gosh darn it so can we!

The weekly meeting of the 'Useless British Actors Guild'

Long Time Dead comes with a good punchy title that would sound good being said by a gruff voice-over guy in a trailer, happily sticks to many of the rules of the teen horror movie that were so enthusiastically flaunted in the original Scream film (at least until they were put straight back into practice without a hint of irony in the sequels, but that rant is for a different place). Nine friends try to get a ‘buzz’, and decide it would be really cool to summon a spirit with a ouija board, one of them gets the bright idea to film it, handy! The spirit they contact isn’t so friendly, telling itself it’s a Djinn (unfortunately not Andrew Divoff) and then gives them the lovely message “ALL DIE”. One of the party freaks out when he starts to have flashbacks to a bunch of whooshing camera shots down corridors, and flings the glass they were using to the ground, despite the warnings that interrupting the summoning before its complete would prevent the spirit from returning to its place of rest. Doh! Not long after that the young man who freaked out leaves his girlfriend for a minute and she’s attacked and killed, left with burn marks on her body. The young lady who set up the whole ouija board experiment goes back to her place and reads up on the Djinn, apparently they’re fire demons who kill anybody that evokes them, you would have thought they’d be grateful. Anyway, nobody believes her until their group is gradually reduced by a mysterious force that leaves its victims badly burnt. Their weird landlord knows more than they realise, and that one of their number might have witnessed a similar incident back in 1979 as a young boy, his father ending up in an institution because of it.

Jeff Hardy's taken it too far this time

So lets look at the rules this film adhere’s to:
*Rule 1: Create a bunch of stupid, self-obsessed characters who are so one-dimentional and have so little development that you will be lucky to remember their names during the movie let alone after it. I’m seeing nine names here on IMDb and I can’t remember who any of them are except that one of them was a blonde chick and one of the others used to be in the British soap opera Eastenders. Oh yeah, and there’s the ‘hero’ character who actually has some semblance of a back-story to his character because, well, the movie wouldn’t work at all without it.
*Rule 2: Make sure these characters are unbelievably idiotic. As if snorting crack off a railway track early on in the movie wasn’t stupid enough, they also break into their seriously crazy landlord’s place while the power is off, they wander around their house in the dark on their own when they’ve already lost some friends that did the exact same thing, and then when escaping from a house they broke into they totally forget to escape the way they got in and instead struggle with the front door twice, allowing the pursuer to eviscerate them.
*Rule 3: Don’t forget that the evil force causing all the havoc makes the usual fatal mistake by leaving the one person most capable of killing it until last, when it knew how important this one particular person was but didn’t kill them earlier when it had numerous opportunities.
*Rule 4: Make sure to add the obligatory “Cheap I’m Not Really Dead Scene” and the “Never Saw It Coming Twist Ending”.
*Unfortunately no sign of the “gratuitous nudity and sexual escapades leading to death” thing, but this doesn’t have a high enough age rating attached to it.

Devil also wanted in connection with making of Blair Witch 2

As you can imagine this film was not terribly original, nor particularly well-written. Making these characters a collection of various cliché’s would have been a step up for these guys as they had not one iota of charisma between them, I guess the acting didn’t help. You didn’t care about them and you couldn’t care less when they get horribly bumped off, you weren’t saddened or pleased to see them go, you didn’t care. The first half of the film is pretty disappointing as a whole, as even the attempts at scares really don’t create much in the way of tension, the atmosphere just wasn’t there. On the other hand the second half redeems things somewhat, as all of a sudden there is some urgency and sense of impending doom, managing a couple of decent scares and one really good one before the entertaining, but extremely predictable, ending. As an exercise of following the usual teen horror formula, it has provided at least 45 minutes of diverting horror entertainment once it gets going, and it thankfully avoids the self-referential ‘humour’ of many of its American counterparts. I can still only remember one of the character’s names, but I’ve certainly seen much worse films.

And that’s actually more of a compliment than you might think.