Inventive horror yarn that transcends the usual slasher fare by mixing in an imaginative, sometimes scarily plausible plot with the usual nasty in-your-face violence that goes with the period. Filmed in New Zealand but set in America, the photography in this film is ruined by a hideous print and poor pan-and-scan job on the video version I saw, but that doesn't stop it being a tense and grisly exercise in terror that proves to be a lot stronger than other '80s horror fare. I know I always use it as a whipping boy, but the Friday the 13 series in comparison is sterile, comic book stuff.
I really liked this film's plot of a science lab being the front of a brainwashing cult, which I believe hadn't been done elsewhere. Some scenes are packed with tension and the film as a whole is very suspenseful. The gore isn't overdone, but is still pretty strong stuff and used in a way to make you squirm (for example, in one scene a boy slashes open his own wrists - ouch!). The scene in which the maid discovers a girl sawing the arm off a corpse is particularly grisly. At the same time, there's a great final twist in the plot (the "kill your father" scene) which I have to say I didn't see coming, although some other moments are predictable.
The acting as a whole is impressive, especially when you consider most of the cast are unknowns. Particularly affecting are Dan Shor as the brainwashed teen, Fiona Lewis as a despicably evil nurse and, most of all, Arthur Dignam (for trivia fans, he went on to play Ernest Thesiger in GODS AND MONSTERS) as the weird-looking, immortal scientist. Great stuff. While the film does have some lulls and seems overlong at even a fairly shot running time, it still manages to be quirky, unpredictable and on the occasion, intensely gripping.
I really liked this film's plot of a science lab being the front of a brainwashing cult, which I believe hadn't been done elsewhere. Some scenes are packed with tension and the film as a whole is very suspenseful. The gore isn't overdone, but is still pretty strong stuff and used in a way to make you squirm (for example, in one scene a boy slashes open his own wrists - ouch!). The scene in which the maid discovers a girl sawing the arm off a corpse is particularly grisly. At the same time, there's a great final twist in the plot (the "kill your father" scene) which I have to say I didn't see coming, although some other moments are predictable.
The acting as a whole is impressive, especially when you consider most of the cast are unknowns. Particularly affecting are Dan Shor as the brainwashed teen, Fiona Lewis as a despicably evil nurse and, most of all, Arthur Dignam (for trivia fans, he went on to play Ernest Thesiger in GODS AND MONSTERS) as the weird-looking, immortal scientist. Great stuff. While the film does have some lulls and seems overlong at even a fairly shot running time, it still manages to be quirky, unpredictable and on the occasion, intensely gripping.