Customer Reviews

Effects

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This was quite a find for me. It is a nice "slice" of late 1970's independent film making from alot of George A. Romero's alumni. The other two reviews are very critical of this film and I am not quite sure why?! It is in no way a graphic film like "Last House On The Left", yet it does give off the same "snuff" feel with pretty good acting and direction. The soundtrack is great too. Kudos to Synapse for this release.
John Harrison who stars in this film also did the music as well as the soundtracks for "Creepshow" and "Day Of The Dead".

"Effects" is a better idea than it is a movie. The first hour is a group of people rambling about making a horror movie with a lot of drug-use, and nothing really happens except snippets of voyeurism that isn't scary or intersting.

The final half hour picks up, but it's predictable. Not a gory movie, but instead a psychological one. If the pacing was better and more events happened in the movie before the final ten minutes, "Effects" would've been enjoyable, but it was too BORING for me to ever watch again.

Curiousity killed me on this one.

Due to a problem with the distributor this film was never actually released until 2005 when Synapse Films put it out on DVD. It's clear to me that this movie was meant to stay buried, because there are far more problems here than simple distribution. Based on a novel by William H. Mooney, the film details a film crew as they make a horror film, but begin to suspect that the killings are real and that they are actually in a snuff movie,thought up by the devious producer. I honestly only gave this movie a shot because Tom Savini has a role in it and I figured he have a hand in ther make-up effects, which usually means we'll get some pretty gory scenes. That's sadlynot the case here, Tom role is some jerky crewmember that nobody likes, and the only bloody sequences we get involves a man being shot in the head, and it's only revealed to be a scene in the movie the crew is making. In fact, there are many scenes that confuse the viewer and gives you a hard time distinguishing which is the movie and which is the movie there making.It becomes rather annoying after the third time. The film's pacing is incredibly slow, with a lot of relatively pointless scenes that just seem to drag on and on.Sometimes annoying music plays overhead to make the scenes even less watchable. The only parts of the film that are worth watching is the extreme close-up T&A we get in the beginning and towards the end when the story picks up and the thruth behind the film production is revealed. With its slow pacing, dubious acting, and numerous pointless sequences, it's no wonder this movie took 25 years to be released. It should have stayed Dead and Buried!