Customer Reviews

Unrest - After Dark Horror Fest

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This is the 5th After Dark movie I have seen so far and much like the others I think this would be a pretty good hour long story for Masters of Horror, but to stretch this one into an hour and a half movie just makes it boring. The opening scene is pretty good and I had high hopes for this one. The story is disjointed at times and just not that interesting. The acting is middling and there are not really any scares. It is interesting that they used real cadavers and I guess if you get grossed out by medical stuff, then this might be a little upsetting, but overall it was a weak film. If you don't have a good horror story to tell then you better throw buckets and blood and have lots of nudity. This doesn't have the story, the blood or the nudity.

This was the first After Dark Horror Fest movie that I saw, and I must say that I was a disappointed after watching it.

Synopsis: The story is about a group of medical students who join "Gross Anatomy", one of them being Alison. She teams up with a group of three other students, Brian, Carlos and Rick. Their first assignment is to examine a cadaver of a young woman. However, Alison starts experiencing strange things from the moment she starts to cut upon the body. Little does she know that, whoever is in contact with the cadaver, die of mysterious circumstances.

Positive aspects:
1. I must admit, I found the initial plot of the story somewhat intriguing. It had a good potential to become something really suspenseful and thought provoking.

2. The actors also did a good job playing their roles. They can only do so much with the material they are given.

3. The movie focused more on the storyline rather than the gory details. While this wasn't such a wise move, it was good to see a movie rely more on the psychological aspect than the queasy details.

Negative aspects: Where do I begin? There were SO many plot holes in this movie, medical and otherwise, that made me lost interest in this movie. I divided them into 2 categories, because there are so many unexplained and unbelievable things that just don't make sense.

*NOTE: This Section contains spoilers so if you have not seen the movie, please don't read any further, unless you want to know how the movie ends*


Medical issues -

1. I am not a medical student, but its common sense that just a whiff of formaldehyde is dangerous, and if you do research on it, you will find out that a few drops in your eyes can make you permanently blind. Large dosage of it could put you in a coma, or worse, death. So I found it ridiculous that in the end, Alison was able to get her boyfriend out of the tank, open the glass top, throw her boyfriend out, and go back in to get the body, without anything happening to her.

2. Also, bodies are generally drained of blood before they are used for autopsies. So I don't understand how such large trails of blood came out of the bag when Alison was dragging it in the end. Even if you don't know anything about this medical aspect, its kind of silly that you don't see any blood coming out of the body throughout the movie when they initially examine it, and all of a sudden, it is coming in the end when Alison is dragging it.

I'm sure people practicing in this area can find out many other issues, but since I don't know much about it, this is what I was able to figure out from just watching it once.


Non-Medical -

1. Since when did the Aztecs come from Brazil?!? They lived in Mexico. The writers of this movie obviously did not do their research. This is probably the most ridiculous point that was repeatedly mentioned.

2. Okay, historical and medical reasons aside. Let's get to the film itself. I agree with building the suspense, but this movie was just building it the whole time without giving any explanations. For around 20 minutes of the whole movie, I think I only saw Alison walking in the corridors with the lights switching on and off and some Aztec chanting in the background. In the beginning this seemed spooky, but later it was just confusing. I don't think the director had any material for one and a half hours, so he had to put these unnecessary scenes to stretch it.

3. Furthermore, I thought the professor was already dead when Alison saw him in the examining room with a chainsaw in his hand. Now we don't see what happened to him, but in the end, he seems fine again. This did not make sense, because if the spirits spared his life, it should have spared the others as well. I mean, Carlos was just doing research in the library and he dies, whereas the professor disrespects the body by putting it in the tank again, and he only loses a leg? What's going on??

I think that if the storyline was a little more believable, this would have been a very interesting movie. It wasn't totally bad, but it wasn't that good either. All in all, I would say that you can rent this movie once, just out of curiosity, but unless you are a fan of the whole After Dark Horror Fest series, you can skip this one.

I love horror movies and saw the 8 film collection at the store which I couldn't wait to purchase. First one I saw was Gravedancer - not bad, good plot and entertaining worth the $7.50. Next was Dark Ride - looks like a remake can't remember the movie though. 4 college students go into a horror house that has a serial killer. Had potential but if you are a fan of Saw, the Hills have Eyes, Jeepers Creepers, Tales of the Crypt and your are looking for that same thrill, then these movies aren't for you. Some have extremely poor acting and at times laughable. However, if you have seen almost every horror movie possible and have time to spare then wait till they are in the $5 dollar bin at Wal-Mart and buy them. As for Unrest - save your money on this one. It was all about a female medical student and a dead cadaver that never raises, not scary at all. The preview made you believe the cadaver raises and kills, but not once did I see the murder victims get hacked/murdered - the best part of a horror movie. this one was a true B movie. If you want to see a dead body raise watch - The Grudge.

Alison Blanchard is a medical student who is beginning a course on Gross Anatomy. Unfortunately, there seems to be something wrong with the cadaver her group is assigned. The body is of a young woman who appears to have committed suicide due to the wounds on the corpse. The audience actually meets the young woman in the very beginning of the film as she stares at her reflection in a mirror with an unsettling intensity (fans of the game show "Deal or No Deal" will be startled to learn the young woman is played by the model Marissa who usually holds case #18). Alison seems to be the only one who notices something is wrong with the cadaver. She has a feeling something isn't right. This is the general tone of the film. Its all about atmosphere.

The movie is never really about what you see but what you don't see. There is always a tone of menace and dread. A scene early in the film summons it up nicely. Alison has to live alone in an abandoned part of the hospital the students train in due to financial aid complications. The lights activate by motion and immediately turn off when you leave a section. The camera moves along with Alison, who is framed by darknes before and behind her. There is a constant fear of something lurking in the dark around her and you clench up waiting for the motion activated lights to reveal some unspeakable nightmare. In this department, the movie gets it right. Too many films go for the gore and shock factor but forget to be suspenseful. Thumbs up to the filmakers.

Now, the reason the movie only gets 3 stars (maybe 3 1/2) is because there is never a payoff. I love suspense but suspense needs to be released. I kept waiting for something to happen and it never did. I am one of those few people who did not like "The Blair Witch Project". It was a great idea but I needed a sense of menace. Everyone was running around, reacting to things only they seemed to hear and see. If just once during that film the camera passed over a quick moving image in the distance, something to instill physical harm, I would have been hooked. This is the same with the Unrest. You'll get bodies (there is a storage tank filled with formaldehyde that almost becomes comical when every time it is opened it reveals another victim), you'll get an explaination (original but a little underdone), but never a "watch out for the killer" moment. It left me a little flat.

I recommend it as a rental. There are some creepy moments worth the time and I will definately keep my eyes out for any future endeavors from the film makers.

In the very beginning of "UNREST" you can almost feel the potential creeping it's way up your spine, but as the movie progresses to the halfway mark the plot regresses and just plain old falls short and takes a detour into the "already been done before" catagory. To me the only sub-genre of horror that can get away with that is the SLASHER flick. Supernatural films must stay fresh to stay alive. With that said, there are a handful of creepy moments as well as natural gross-out's but not even close to enough to save this flop. I myself was not fulfilled.

Unrest portrays the experiences of several first-year medical students, who unwittingly dissect a female cadaver haunted by 50,000 dead Aztec spirits. After spending some time with the body, members of this anatomy-class dissection group begin to feel a supernatural presence, and those coming in contact with it begin to die mysteriously. In an attempt to understand what is happening, they retrieve videos of the patient, identified as an American researcher driven mad by the anguished souls in a vast grave that she uncovered. Ultimately, in a scatterbrain kind of way, the bimbo protagonist decides to cremate the corpse and bring the ashes to Brazil, which seems to resolve their troubles.

Plagued by unimaginative thinking, Unrest contributes very little to its genre and suffers from awkward juxtapositions of emotions and scenarios. There was nothing creative about the killings or the motivations for them. Moreover, the inexperience and rigidity of the cast members diminish the "horror" elements of the film. Of course, any student of history knows that the Aztec civilization was based primarily in Mexico, not Brazil.

Another installment of 8 Films to Die For--which, personally, is becoming 8 Films That We Couldn't Get Release Funding For, So We'll Market Them As Being 'Too Intense' for Mainstream Theatre But Really They're Just Pioneer Efforts By People Who Would Like to Make Movies.

All right, so maybe I can only apply that to 3 Films (this, _Dark Ride_ and _Reincarnation_, which had extra disappointment considering that it was made by a guy with a good _Grudge_ resume), but I'm still going to gut it out and get through the others, because, durn it, I love horror movies, but MAN can the poor efforts stink up the room!

This one had a pretty promising start--a few young med students (one, yes, looking like Britney Spears had dropped out at the last minute and so the body double stepped in) have a cadaver for anatomy class who is a little creepy--first, she seems to have been self-injurious, and second, she seems to move on occasion.

This is a nice stsrt--the hospital itself has some nice lighting problems, and the cadaver provides some nice ick factor early on...but after the first half hour or so, things start to fall apart. There is the obligatory atheist/pagan/Christian tirading, a possessed friend, some obligatory bra shots, a fiancee who must obviously go, an ancient curse, a random bee-YATCH send-off, budding romance, a mysterious history, a therapist, a skeptical med professor, off-camera slayings...this is all really too much to try to handle in an under-90-minute framework as this tries to. The film is simply overloaded, and so it loses all rhythm and drive.

It's a shame that this film couldn't trust the simplicity of the ickiness of a cadaver and the creepiness of it being a little bit alive, something that could have been pursued with great result. But instead, it has to pile up turn after turn, and the result is this--two stars, but hope that SOMETHING in this fest might produce some true shudders.

This movie could have been way freakier if they changed the story a little.

First of all, when you first see the "HELP" in blood drenched on the towel that Alison finds, you know right then that the antagonist is not dangerous, but is looking for help instead?

Lame.

The illusion collapses right here folks.

The blood message on the towel should have said "You're all dead", and the cadaver should come to life and run around killing people.

Instead, the "spirit" that possessed the cadaver just goes around possessing everyone else, and everyone commits suicide.

Not fready at all.

A psychotic zombie cadaver would have been so much scarier.

The cover for this DVD is the scariest thing about it. It's also one of those covers that has nothing to do with the movie. No cold corpse crawls out from a morgue's holding container. Wish one did. Then maybe it might have contained something scary. Yet another one of Afterdark Horrorfest's lame excuses for horror. Yet to see one that was good the whole way through. BORING. AVOID like the plague.

this really isn't a horror movie (at least until it gets closer to the end). it's really a suspense thriller. a lot of the criticism for this movie comes from people expecting certain things from the it (and being that it was marketed as one of 8 films too shocking to be released, that is understandable.) but the music, the directing, the acting and the script are all very solid. it's not a slick hollywood film, and you can sense that it had a modest budget. but the film manages to hold the "suspension of disbelief" that most movies of the genre fail to do. while it doesn't do anything especially different than things you might have seen in other movies, it is a very good low-budget movie.

of the three movie i have seen from the "horror fest" (gravedancers and dark ride being the other two), this is the best, although the least "horror"-like and with the least amount of "special effects". if that is what you are looking for, you may be disappointed. if not, you should be pleasantly surprised with this indie thriller.