Customer Reviews

Perkins' 14

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

 

 

Perkins 14 is a taut, fast-paced chiller that delivers the goods compared to most of the bargain basement junk that passes for horror these days.

Victims are slashed, impaled, mutilated and bludgeoned to death but it's not a slasher movie.

Victims are torn apart and eaten but it's not a zombie movie.

What it is about is Perkins a physcopath who has kidnapped 14 children and kept them for 10 years locked in cages in his basement where he has abused, starved, and drugged them out of their skulls, and he has videotaped each one showing the stalking, kidnapping and abuse of each child.

Kyle, one of the last kidnapped is the son of the local sherrif named Dwayne Hopper who is wracked with guilt over the fact that he gave up too quickly trying to locate his missing son. Hopper also has an adulterous wife and a goth-light daughter who has the type of boyfriend you wouldn't invite over for Sunday dinner with Mom & Dad. The cages are accidently unlocked, Sheriff Hopper kills Perkins and then the carnage begins to escalate in a series of brutal and gruesome killings.

The father-son reunion towards the end is both heart-breaking and
horrifying. The movie is left open-ended for a sequel and I hope they never do make one. A sequel is unneccesary and would just be a rehash and pointless to try to "improve" the original.

The movie is really a 4.5 rated movie bacause of a few lapses in logic but I opted to rate upwards rather than backwards because the movie took me by surprise and has more thrills and chills than some movies that try to pass themselves off as horror.

Officer Dwayne Hopper discovers that he may have the man that kidnapped his son ten years earlier locked up in one of his cells. After interrogating the man and sending a friend to investigate his home, Hopper unwittingly unleashes his prisoner's fourteen victims, whose years of torture and drug exposure have turned them into feral killers! What begins as a suspenseful play on the familiar SILENCE OF THE LAMBS motif quickly descends into a bloody survival Horror film with unexpected thrills. PERKINS' unlikeable characters manage to garner the audience's support when they are faced with the unstoppable PCP-induced teens. Craig Singer brings a frenetic energy to the attack sequences, which include a number of inventive deaths (the most memorable of which involves a black screen broken only by the light of a flashlight as it hammers into a policeman's skull repeatedly). The film is a welcome surprise out of the After Dark Horrorfest III!

-Carl Manes
I Like Horror Movies

Perkins 14 is another entry in this year's batch of After Dark Horrorfest films and one of the better ones. Patrick O'Kane plays Dwayne Hopper, a member of a small tourist town's Sheriff Department. Ten year's earlier, Hopper's son Kyle was kidnapped from his bedroom, the last of 14 child abductions that went unsolved. The pain of losing his son has driven Dwayne to alcoholism and torn his marriage apart. As Dwayne checks in for the night shift, he finds that a mysterious man named Perkins is locked up in the jail. As Dwayne talks to him, he becomes convinced that this man may no something about the child abductions.

Against orders from his superiors, Dwayne investigates the man's home to find numerous dank, dirty, but empty cells in Perkins' basement. He also finds a library of video tapes, all showing the torturous treatment the children received at the hands of Mr. Perkins. Now you're thinking that this may be one of those cat and mouse type thrillers where the cop knows who the killer is but does not have any legal evidence to charge him with. Will the cop go against his superiors to get revenge on the man who took his son? Ah, but here's where Perkins 14 tosses us a curve ball. It's a tale of revenge to be sure, but not the cop's revenge. As mentioned, Dwayne found only empty cells. Those children, now teenagers, tortured and turned into feral, drugged up beasts, have been set loose on the small town in a rampaging, "28 Days Later" style, attacking everything in their path and devouring their prey.

Director Craig Singer's quick change of direction from taut thriller to zombie-style action was surprising and well disguised. There's gore-a-plenty as bodies are literally ripped to pieces leaving the bestial kids to wrestle over pieces of entrails. It culminates with a standoff in the town's police station as a small group of survivors tries to survive the night.

Perkins 14 is not without its drawbacks. It's hard to imagine that a small town could be overrun by a group of 14 people, even if they are animalistic. Rather than try to remain hidden in their homes the residents of Stone Cove seem all too willing to venture out at night and make themselves easy targets. And it seems as if the Sheriff's office only has about three guns...go figure. The women in the film, and I mean all of them, are guilty of overacting, particularly Mihaela Mihut, who plays Dwayne's wife, Janine. They end up distracting the viewer from the plot and you're soon hoping they become the next meal.

Singer also directed the 2006 After Dark Horrorfest entry, Dark Ride, and while it's not a classic, Perkins 14 is certainly better than that earlier effort.

This movie had an intersting premise, but it could of used a little more action. And the ending was kind of weak.

I'm a big horror fan, but maybe I've become a little desensitized to and a bit tired of the same old canabilistic frenzy that goes on in a lot of them, but I was most interested in the mystery of how these Perkins 14 creatures became what they were. I like this one enough to say I would dust it off one day and watch it again. Not the best of the After Dark set, but not the worst.

Here we have one of the few truly interesting concepts from the Afterdark series. The setup goes that, 10 years prior to the film start, this man Perkins has kidnapped 14 children and raised them in kennels in his basement - we assume he conditioned them to essentially be his army of killers. One of the parents of the kidnapped children happens to be a police officer who comes to suspect the man in his jail cell is the kidnapper, and through a series of events, accidentally sets these 14 psycho killers loose upon the small town to wreak havoc.

As I said, the setup is very interesting. It's a shame, then, that director Craig Singer (who also helmed the abysmal DARK RIDE from the first Horror-fest) could not find an interesting story to tell with such fertile ground. It's hard to really decide where the blame should go. The film is largely shot well, and the acting is, at worst, average for a horror film. So who to blame? I would begin with the writers. The dialogue itself is not particularly bad, but it is the plotting and pacing that cause the film to suffer. The film spends exactly half of its running time getting to the point of releasing the killers - while the first half is interesting in a slowly-building tension sort of way as the cop and kidnapper engage in a "Hannibal Lector" style dialogue, it goes on entirely too long, and as such we aren't given nearly enough time to invest in the aftermath of the psychos being unleashed. A better director would have accomplished the first half of the film in about twenty minutes.

As for that second half, being rushed and probably working with a limited budget, we have to glean from radio calls that the mayhem is going on city wide, because we never really see it. These 14 psychos from the title actually amount to about 5 psychos on screen, and they largely only attack our main family of characters. Within about twenty minutes of the escape, the characters are already holed up inside the city jail, where the remainder of the film plays out. And at this point, the viewer has never really gained any compassion for any of these characters, who are predictably one-dimensional. You have the typical goth-daughter, the cheating wife, and a doofus of a father, none of which elicit the slightest bit of sympathy.

Now, when I say doofus, I mean it! This father/cop is a terrible character for a protagonist, who makes some of the dumbest choices in the history of horror. He relentlessly puts others in danger for no good reason. Early on, he sends an off-duty officer to check out the kidnappers house with NO BACK-UP. Later, he leaves a civilian in the back seat of his police cruiser, which he just got finished telling the audience can ONLY be opened from the outside! Not long after, he allows another civilian to go to the bathroom all alone when the psychos have invaded the jail. Near the end, he actually sends his wife to go fetch the keys on the other side of the psycho-filled jail while he remains in the locked room with the shotgun. And in the most incomprehensible move of all time, actually locks his daughter in a jail cell and in the next scene literally hands the keys to one of the psychos!!

But he's not the only doofus - other characters repeatedly stand by and watch friends and loved ones being attacked and devoured without even attempting to help - including a police officer who simply stands dumbfounded, shining his flashlight at one of the bloody murders happening just three feet away from him!! One character even allows a psycho to slowly approach her, strip her of the shotgun she was holding, and blow her away with it. Why she didn't fire on him the moment he entered the room . . . .?

It's this kind of idiocy on the part of the characters that thoroughly sink the second half of the film. What could have been an effectively intense final act along the lines of a film like 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, instead falls into just one excuse after another to showcase an extreme amount of gore. The filmmakers seem only to revel in trying to gross out the audience (including one groaningly poor effect of a psycho crawling away from his severed legs - you can clearly see the board the actor is laying on being dragged away from the prosthetic legs).

Seeing as how this film did not get a wide release, I would be interested to see a more talented director and cast pick it up. The idea of conditioned killers, one of which is the son of the protagonist, could make for a very interesting psychological thriller. But PERKINS 14 is not that film - avoid at all costs!

Ah yes, another year and another lineup of After Dark Horrorfest flicks. Perkins' 14 is the most interesting of the bunch, considering its history involves a fan-submitted idea and story. While that alone is reason enough to give this film a look, Perkins' 14 as a whole sadly doesn't amount to much. The story involves small town cop Dwayne (Patrick O'Kane) whose young son was kidnapped a decade earlier. He soon figures out that the abductor is Ronald Perkins (Richard Brake) and that he's inhabiting one of the cells at the station, and learns that his son is still alive, and among the 14 children that Perkins had imprisoned and experimented upon to turn them into killing machines. And before you know it, they're all set free and begin wreaking havoc on the town. That's all there really is plot wise, as Perkins' 14 features some gigantic leaps in logic and a variety of dumb people doing dumb things and winding up dead for it. There might be some level of enjoyment to find in the film, but it is so bleak, gloomy, and awfully lit that it will be hard to do so. Directed by Craig Singer, who helmed Dark Ride for the first round of After Dark Horrorfest flicks, Perkins' 14 is a disappointing waste. There was Feast-style potential here to be sure in terms of the story, setting, and characters, but in the end, Perkins' 14 falls mostly flat. There's decent gore effects and a small role from former Misfits singer Michale Graves, but it isn't enough to warrant Perkins' 14 as anything other than wasted potential.

I Really enjoyed this movie. Horrorfest III Was kind of an off year, with movies like (The Broken, & Voices.) But this one, (Along With Autopsy) Are Amazing. This too, has the potential to become a cult classic. Kind of like 30 Days of Night, Meets Zombies of mass destruction..lol. A Really intresting plot, and alot of depth. It is also pretty disturbing. My Only problem with it, is i wish that they would have chosen a diffrent actor, to play the main role.

Police Officer Dwayne Hopper (not a likable cop, eavesdrop on his teenage daughter talking about boys, mean to wife etc.) lost his young son to an abductor 10 years ago. A creepy man named Ronald Perkins is in jail who seems to fit the profile of the abductor. Operating on an "educated hunch" he has an off duty cop check out Perkin's home. Meanwhile the local judge wants Perkins freed. Perkins and Hooper have a face to face conversation which reminded me of the mind games played by Hannibal Lechter. The partner ends up getting killed at the Perkins' house, so Hopper takes Perkins home only to find videos of the children who were abducted. Perkins is also a pharmacist who apparently used chemicals on the children to alter their mind. Unlike Lechter, Perkins' mind games end when a bullet splatters his brains over the floor. So now we have good news and bad news...The good news is that the kids are still alive, the bad news is that they are psychopathic killers who are going to town. Language, some minor sex scenes, no nudity.

I saw this film in NYC the other week and I had the best time. I wasn't expecting too much - last years horrorfest films were not very inspired. That said...This is not only a great film but its also an authentic :"Grindhouse" film! I loved the acting and the direction. It also had an old time film score that made the film that much more enjoyable. This film is going to become a classic horror film - it had a really dark tone and I won't give away the ending but it was very powerful. Excellent gore and characters I actually cared about. Bravo!