The Devil's Chair (2007)

This British horror film is unusual in a few aspects. It starts by showing the end (or is it?) of the story. It has the main character, Nick, as a narrator, who's more often a commentator who hits the pause button (freeze-frame) when he makes a comment. Nick is considered criminally insane because of the way his lover died 4 years ago in an abandoned asylum, but Nick insists it was due to supernatural causes (involving a weird chair). Early in the film, Nick admits he can be the only one who did it although he doesn't remember doing it. An old professor, his assistant and two students have the "genius" idea to bring back the supposedly criminally insane Nick to the asylum where the murder was committed, to study him. Right there, I had a problem believing such a dumb idea could actually happen.The "devil's chair" in the abandoned asylum is a sinister-looking chair with a skull, initially inoffensive, which "probes" people (creepiest effects of the movie) before shunting them off to another version of the asylum with a demon-skulled tentacled monster roaming. I thought sometimes it looked freakish, sometimes amateurish. The acting was unequal, but I think it might have been intentional. The pompous old professor was atrocious in his line delivery. The main character/narrator was actually good playing it serious, troubled, intense, sometimes mean, channelling Jason Statham. The others were OK, except the brown-haired assistant that was also bad, but nowhere near the level of the professor. There were jarring changes in the tone of the movie with the main character actually admonishing the viewer once. The "normal" version of the asylum was undermined by the irrational, sometimes corny, behaviour of the characters, which in a way got eventually explained. The "other" version of the asylum was sometimes unnerving with interesting cinematography.However, it's the last act (last 20 minutes or so) that was really horrifying with its final twist that I liked but that might frustrate others. For low-budget horror, it does try to be somewhat different but ends up a mixed-bag. I wondered what messages the creators were trying to convey if anything. One of them might be that the true horror doesn't lie in supernatural shenanigans but in the human psyche. Another might be simply what the main character spews out angrily at the viewer near the end. I don't think I particularly liked this movie, but I found it positively peculiar nevertheless.Rating: 6 out of 10 (Good)

TDC is a movie that shows refreshing honesty by admitting to its own incompetence half an hour before the end, but then berates the viewer for wanting to watch the film in the first place! The movie begins with the narrator - the "berater" - looking rather gloomy and depressed, in a dark room, apparently the victim of evil forces (and in-breeding, but that's another story), a story which he is about to convey. The snag is that he will LIE to the viewer for the next 90 minutes, until he finally 'fesses up to his own killing spree, but not before hassling the viewer for being a fan of splatter horror films. (Apparently, the writer/director Mason is a staunch proponent of NOT practicing what you preach.) West (the berater) does a bit of a Jason Statham impersonation, through the narration mainly. He even looks somewhat like a watered-down version of Statham, sort of if we took the original Statham, compressed him, starved him, and prevented him from working out for a year. The narrator is also a pause-fetishist. He keeps stopping i.e. pausing the projection in order to tell us things, not trusting our ability to watch and listen simultaneously (sort of like Mason can't chew gum and walk at the same time). So huge is the influence of the berater/liar on the director that Mason stops the movie every time the narrator wishes it. Now that's what I call intimidation.The berater's narration, which starts off decently, gets increasingly silly. One example is when he jokes about how he easily he got Rachel to take her clothes off, while they're both sitting in Hell, drenched in blood. It is at this point, at the latest, that TDC loses any viewers that were still taking any of this half-seriously (provided the viewer in question had a semblance of taste). Then, just minutes later, he goes into a soon-to-be legendary brief rant in which he actually trashes the movie, then turns against us, the viewers, almost as if blaming US for the film-makers' ineptitude. Yeah, that's right, Jason clone, blame the viewer that you guys couldn't put together a solid horror film without resorting to moronic characters and cretinous plot-twists.The plot-twist being that he had been lying to us all along. He IS the killer. There is no demon. It's all been made up. Nye-nye nye-nye nyeh nyeh. What an ingeniously written script. How difficult it must be to lie to the viewers. I guess hardly anyone can do that! Must take enormous talent to provide false information for 90 minutes. The director reminds me of a 5 year-old kid who'd been lying to his pal and then admits to it much later, shouting "ha! gotcha!". (That's where the nye-nyeh nyeh-nyeh comes in, if you hadn't guessed it.) And what a moronic ending, one that has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. We have been lied to by the narrator (i.e. the writer/director) because suddenly this switches from supernatural demon-horror to insane serial-killer on-the-loose butcher-rama. Why make an effort to write a clever screenplay with intelligent plot-twists when you can simply cheat the viewer from the first minute onwards and then bombard him with nonsense in the last minutes, hoping to turn this Z-movie crap into a talked-about cult item. Keep dreaming, Mason.Yes, Mason, a Z-movie. You referred to it as a B-movie in one your rants, but I guess you over-estimated your little horroric turd a tad. The only message I can take away from this poorly executed joke of a movie is to never trust the narration again.Oh yeah. And to never again watch a movie made by this incompetent clown.The blond actress playing Rachel is beautiful. The only positive aspect to this big fat mess.

Stoned idiot and his hot girlfriend break into an abandoned insane-asylum, take a hit of acid and then decide to have sex while sitting in a demonically possessed electric chair (!) Said chair then comes to life(! again) and burns the hell out of the girl, as the excuse for disgusting effects. Four years later, we see this stoner, now being released from a hospital for the criminally insane and forced to return to the scene of the incident by a Cambridge doctor who arranged his release, Dr Willaird, who looks like a cross between older Sean Connery and Mick Fleetwood, with a bit of Christopher Lee thrown in.Melissa (Louise Griffiths) and Rachel (Elize du Toit) are hot; and the rambling, stream-of-consciousness voice-overs of the lead actor are amusing to a point, but too much contempt for the audience quickly becomes tiresome. Everything else about this fourth-wall-breaking commentary on people who watch horror flicks to see gore and mayhem is either pretentious, overly gory, or just boring. And in the end, it tries to get away with its own nonsensical plot by claiming to take place in the twisted little mind of its lead character. But the producers claim that they left the film up to people to interpret their own answers. No, you put out a film which makes little sense and tried to put it off on us, the viewers, to make sense out of it.F*ckin' yawn.

With a pocketful of drugs, Nick West takes out his girlfriend Sammy, for a good time.When they explore an abandoned asylum, the discovery of a bizarre device, a cross between an electric chair and sadistic fetish machine, transforms drugged-out bliss into agony and despair.After Sammy is brutally assaulted and murdered by unseen forces, Nick becomes the number-one suspect.Years pass and Nick, who had been locked up in a mental hospital, is released into the care of eminent psychiatrist Dr. Willard, who is hell-bent on exposing the truth behind the killing.Accompanied by Dr. Willard and several of his students, Nick returns to the scene of the crime....This film likes to think that it is clever, with all the breaking of the fourth wall, and the main protagonist talking to us, the viewer, but up until the very impressive final ten minutes, the film is as boring as hell.But then, is this the film makers intention, for making us truly sit through 70 minutes of very, very poor acting, until he decides to give us one of the most disturbing ten minutes committed to DVD? If that was, then the man is a genius.Jason Statham must have busy, as was Luke Goss, as the lookalike actor isn't the best, but does his job with much suffice. The rest of the cast are disposable, apart from the on who played Izzy in Hollyoaks, who makes it all a little more tolerable.So this film could be a genius piece of cinema, but to make the first two acts so mundane is unforgivable.