'Allo. This is part of sleeper54's excellent Re-Write Write-off. The idea is simple; each contributor has to take a review of theirs that they feel is a great big sack of cack and give it the once over, or "pick a 'nastie' review of yours and 'paint it up purty'" as Tom puts it.

So here's a film I reviewed last year that I initially watched when I was drunk. I then wrote my review up while I was sober and realised - when I was somehow roped into watching it again - that I made so many inaccuries and general mistakes in my write up that I'm surprised that I didn't get more than the one solitary SH grade.

Here's what I've done: For curiosities sake, I've included my first review below this re-write for comparitive reasons, and deleted the submission I posted last year. For my own nostalgia, I've also kept hold of the comments and ratings I've received. The large bulk of the review I've completely changed into a more accurate review, but decided to keep the original intro, overview of the characters and conclusion because... well, I couldn't be bothered re-doing them. I've edited these parts out of my initial review, just because I don't want to be repetitious. And for your benefit, I've even gone to the trouble of explaining away their omission, which I have helpfully highlighted in squared parentheses for ya . Kinda like a directors commentary, no?

SHOW TIME:

“The British Are Coming” roared Colin Welland at the 1982 Academy Awards after picking up a golden statue for Best Writer. Yes, well, if that was an example of us Brits coming, then the following 20 years have been nothing more than a faked orgasm.

The problem is, as UK cinema has opted to portray its own country as being inhabited by charming public school kids, or working class losers, (a la Notting Hill) the rest of the world seems to have overtaken it somewhat in terms of innovation. Realising that the world is beginning to get tired of foppish dramas starring Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter et al, some bright spark decided that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Unfortunately, said bright spark – in this case the positively mediocre director Marcus Adams – has decided to jump on the one bandwagon that every respectable filmmaker has long since abandoned, that of the the‘teen slasher’, and delivered a UK film more clichéd, idiotic and downright insulting than a thousand Urban Legend’s.

Where to begin? Well, how about right at the beginning? So there are these eight hip and happening young adults right? You know the kind I’m on about, the kind of kids who snort cocaine of train tracks for a laugh, the sort of crazily irresponsible tykes who’d do anything for a buzz. They’re young dumb and full of cum, all hormones and a devil-may-care attitude.

Except it isn’t specifically the devil who cares, not on this occasion, but a seriously pissed off North African fire demon (or a ‘djinn’ as I believe they like to be called in social circles) who is accidentally released from the spirit realm after a harmless bit of ouija board tomfoolery, in a conveniently desolate segment of a large London nightclub, all goes a bit wrong.

Turns out that this djinn has got a lot of unfinished business in the mortal realm and has been pining for some release in years. But instead of thanking our group of morons, the genie instead takes it upon himself to, reasonably enough, stalk and ultimately murderise them all in a descendingly ludicrous manner. There's only one way to get rid of the darn thing, and that's to perform a ceremony called a "banishing", which it’s say to say involves a lot more than a stern telling off.

The main problem with Long Time Dead is that it’s an English film trying far too hard to be American-chic, and it just doesn’t work. You can start a film off in a nightclub and throw in as many neon strobes as you want, but if your settings look more like the interior of an Ikea showroom as opposed to some trendy teenage spot then it’s obvious that things are starting off on the wrong foot. It wants so hard to be damn cool, but is anything but. Yes, this is a minor fault, but it symbolises everything that’s wrong with the film: it tries to hard to wrap itself up in Hollywood skin that it only succeeds in showing Adams up as being nothing but a third-rate hack who believes that his work is a lot more intense and stylish than it actually is.

Think ‘hack’ is too harsh a word? Not when it becomes obvious that Adams has seen the Evil Dead films a lot of times, and decides to turn Long Time Dead into a feature length love letter to Sam Raimi… by stealing, copying and basically plagiarising every single trick in the book. So what do we get when during the copious scenes in which our octad of characters are stalked? That’ll be Raimi’s infamous steadicam shot zooming through various locations at high speed. Characters get possessed by something demonic? Why not have their eyes turning into cat-like peepers? If you’re after a cheap jump, would you care for having things quickly zipping by the camera? And why not throw in a couple of anticlimactic deaths, complete with cheap prosthetics, and some overly sinister ‘secondary’ characters with long-hidden dark secrets?

All of which could possibly be forgiven if Long Time Dead was...well, scary but the fact of the matter is that I’ve had scarier shits. Aside from an admittedly well–constructed initial murder (which loses massive points purely for the fact that the victim is the only decent looking chick in the film. Criminal) which promises bigger, better and fierier things, but never delivers them. The rest of the time we get supposedly tense confrontations that peeter out into laughably ridiculous resolutions, the most severe being the scene in which a pot smoking girl is stalked by a couple of toilet cubicle doors. No, I’m not kidding. And, unbelievably, Adams uses the same red herring of having some unseen person knocking around a barge on two separate occasions. The first time is boring enough, the second makes you want to bludgeon everyone involved to death with a blunt instrument.

Most of the time though Adams doesn’t have the courage to follow through with his convictions. Actually, scratch that, where Adams actually has his biggest headache is working out what his convictions actually are. While he does a serviceable job of cutting away at the last minute when killing off his cast, he then cocks it all up by then almost immediately cutting back to the carnage and overdoing it on the gore front. So while most of the murders and deaths are committed off camera, it’s a largely redundant move given that Adams wraps subtlety up in a Molotov cocktail and fires it out the window by showing us the aftermath.

Someone should also explain to those involved that in order for a horror movie to work, it’s important, nay vital, that the audience can connect, and therefore sympathise, with the characters. The eight morons we are supposed to root for here are quite possibly the most unlikeable bunch of teens ever cobbled together for our ‘pleasure’. None of the characters are particularly interesting, and, as you’d expect from a British film, the dispositions of its cast are pretty mundane: the usual roll call of snobby Londoners (Melanie Gutteridge, Joe Absolom, and Lara Belmont), a brash Scot (Alec Newman), a contemptuously stereotyped northerner (Marsha Thomason), the older ‘voice-of-reason’ (James Hillier), the sad outsider who no one really likes (Mel Raido), and a loudmouth yank (Lucas Haas) - no English film would be complete without one - are all present and correct, ready to meet their maker.

And as typical hackneyed as the characters are, so too are their actions, their response and in many cases their actual denouncements. Answer me this: if you find out that you have brought into the world a seriously ill-tempered beastie who is determined to put the beat down on you, do you A) hang around for a few days, not really doing much except going back to the places where it’s pretty frickin’ obvious you’re going to end up toasted, or B) climb into the nearest car and boot it until you’re as far away from the nearest person as you can possibly get? Guess which one, dear readers, our collection of morons decide to do.

In fact, the whole astuteness of the film seems to be a bit skewy the more you think about it. Why exactly is the film at pains to constantly point out that one of our protagonists has just literally moved to the area? It’s certainly got little to do with the actual story, other than offering a tragically weak early attempt at tension in which one of the other characters hears someone rummaging around the house. If they’d have been some sort of link to the demonic events, then it’d have been fair enough, but their inclusion offers feck all except that of a gobby little upstart. Not so much a red herring as a brown stain.

And why oh why oh WHY throughout the film do people constantly agree that “it’s not a good idea if we split up, we should stay together” when moments later they all decide to go off exploring enclosed and darkened area alone? It’s bad enough to have genre flaws ignored, but to actually recognise them and still ignore them? Do these filmmakers use shotguns to clean out their ears?

Long Time Dead is one of those films that genuinely could have been good, but ultimately cocked-up by a director of unspeakable crapness. Like all decent horror movies, it tries to establish a history to the proceedings to give a grandiose scale to it all, but then fails to properly explore this potentially intriguing avenue, opting instead for cheap scares and run-of-the-mill acting. What few moments of class there are pale into insignificance when compared to the sheer tackiness of the cliched mess that surround them, with an ending that is as straightforward and bog-standard as they come.

There’s no doubt that the original script was a tighter, far more intricate haunted house thriller that got bogged down by studio interference. There’s also no doubt that America thought it had monopolised the market when it came to low-rent slasher flicks. Watch out, the British are coming.

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AND NOW, THE BITS FROM MY FIRST REVIEW WHAT I’VE GONE AND LEFT OUT:

To put it bluntly Long Time Dead is a dim horror movie in which eight London-based clubbers, high on booze and coke, decide to experiment with a ouija board and conjure up an implacably evil North African genie that threatens to kill them all in violent ways. There's only one way to get rid of the darn thing, and that's to perform a ceremony called a "banishing". So while they search in vain for the very tonic that will 'banish' this seriously pissed off Djinn, they find their numbers being slowly diminished, one-by-one. And so on

[Basically, I felt that this paragraph read a bit flat, and just tried to be a bit too cynical without achieving much. Also, there isn’t actually that much information about the plot itself. I couldn’t be bothered simply rewording it, so I just scrapped it and started from scratch instead].

Despite suffering from a rather fundamental basis (after all, the old “a bunch of kids use a ouija board, but it all goes horribly wrong” idea is far from the most shocking or original of ideas) Long Time Dead actually does possess a decent story.

[A load of bollocks basically. The film does NOT possess a decent plot, at all. It’s complete clag].

Shamefully though, the bulk of complaints lay within the laziness of the writing itself. It's one thing to have a good story, but the manner in which Adams opts to waste the opportunity to exploit its potential is an absolute crime. The film offers its audience with a multitude of sinister characteristics and secretive ‘previous events that mustn’t be discussed’, but inexplicably decides to do absolutely nothing with them. There are constant hints about the ominous presence of a cagey landlord (Tom Bell), but actual details are never disclosed. The script also repeatedly cites a Moroccan cult from the 70s, but never properly explains what connection it, or the subsequent consequences, have to do with the events occurring within the timeframe of the film itself.

[Fuck alone knows why I claimed that the story about the landlord and the events that occurred in Morocco in 1979 are never explained, because the film spends pretty much most of its running time doing just that. The landlords shadiness is blatantly explained, and one of the main characters has a direct link with what happened in '79, so I have genuinely no idea why I wrote what I did]

And such is Long Time Dead's silliness, the aforementioned “banishing” ceremony never actually manifests itself, as it all expires in a mess of blood, thrashing, and evil people's eyes morphing into cats' eyes.

[My comments about the “banishing” ceremony is only half right (it does actually occur, but to absolutely no avail) SO it wasn’t really necessary to explain away]

Films are not required to explain every last plot detail to the to the point of condescending, but it would be nice if they could follow a coherent path, especially when Adams chooses to concentrate on the films more trivial subplots with heavy-handed dialogue: in the absence of visible sexuall tension between characters, we literally have to be told that Spence (James Hillier) is "thinking about having sex with Annie (Melanie Gutteridge), like everyone else". Yeah, because - like, duh - we couldn't have worked out these particular traits ourselves. A little background information would have gone a long way, but these glaringly patronising moments are a prime example of the levels of lethargy the film possesses.

[A fair enough point, but it’s not especially vital to stay in the review really. Slows things down a bit, so it had to go]

In its favour, the film does inject its protagonists with a modicum of intelligence, abandoning the whole forehead-slapping '“Gee I wonder why that person we sent to the basement about 30 minutes ago to see why the power went off hasn't returned. Damn, why isn't this flashlight working?’ *cue heavy breathing and sound of axe being sharpened* “Oh, there you are”’ shtick. This can only be seen as A Good Thing for horror films, purely because if The Blair Witch Project has taught us anything, it’s that it's far more frightening when the characters are aware of the danger they are in, rather than gormlessly wondering around in the dark and basically doing the killers work for them.

[WRONG AGAIN! The characters in this film are total slapnuts and do exactly the things I claim that they don’t. Check my comments on this in my updated review. I must have been drinking something REALLY strong to have thought this].

There’s also a glorious scene in which two characters review the video of the seance, while the initial murder is handled extremely well.

['Glorious' a perhaps a little too over exaggerating. It’s fairly okay, but seeing as the characters in the ‘video’ scene do exactly what I claim that don’t do in my above paragraph (i.e. wander off alone) then it’s not an accurate enough statement. Plus, the whole thing could have been a lot better had it actually shown us what happened during the séance itself]

A crying shame, then, that these surprisingly good moments are flooded out by the utterly appalling editing. Jesus, if you thought Thir13en Ghosts was bad with its constant smash cuts and headache-inducing frame jumping, you haven’t seen anything. Long Time Dead attempts to use visual and sound at every opportunity in order to heighten tension, but succeeds only in confusing itself.

[Again, not true. Aside from the opening few minutes, there isn’t that much in the way of hyperbolic editing at all, certainly nowhere near as much as Thir13en Ghosts by a long way]

It’s a veritable mess of noise and almost-subliminal imagery that just doesn’t work. And any level of mystery or suspense Adams was aiming for is completely destroyed due to his reliance on pointedly indicating who is next going to fall victim to the fiery paws of the rampant demon.

[The comment about the sound quality is valid, but I wouldn’t really say that Adams makes it obvious who is going to be next to die, at least not to the point of saying that it ‘completely destroys’ the mystery element. At least two of the characters whom die are not the ones you expect to do so. Wrong again then]

So there you go, a shedload of inaccuracies that completely and utterly negated all the VH’s I received. Rest assured, I haven’t made the same mistake in my updated review.

End.

SO WHAT DID YOU LOT THINK OF THIS ONE THE FIRST TIME ROUND:

Vormancian - Very Helpful Jul 10 '02
skbreese - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
cripper - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
tbthorn - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
d_fienberg - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
flamepillar - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
Cartman_2k - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
AliventiAsylum - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
George_Chabot - Very Helpful Jul 11 '02
kristinafh - Very Helpful Jul 12 '02
JackSommersby - Very Helpful Jul 13 '02
drdevience - Very Helpful Nov 14 '02
mfunk75 - Very Helpful Mar 27 '03
Naomi7835 - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
food_critic - Very Helpful Jul 10 '02
LifeStar - Very Helpful Jul 10 '02
naphtalia - Very Helpful Jul 10 '02
wordwalker - Very Helpful Jul 10 '02
gungian - Very Helpful Jul 11 '02
BigJack - Very Helpful Jul 11 '02
anderclayton - Very Helpful Jul 14 '02
dedemw - Very Helpful Jul 23 '02
artbyjude - Very Helpful Jul 25 '02
countessa - Very Helpful Jul 27 '02
opinionsharer - Very Helpful Aug 01 '02
4-1-1 - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
cletta1201 - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
annecal - Very Helpful Jul 10 '02
tigger500 - Very Helpful Jul 27 '02
PacManY2J - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
rianleeann - Very Helpful Jul 11 '02
brandon_m - Very Helpful Aug 02 '02
thed_man - Very Helpful Jul 11 '02
scigamer - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
quasar - Very Helpful Jul 12 '02
hwz1 - Helpful Aug 01 '02
prophet3 - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
albrtlee - Very Helpful Jul 09 '02
Stacimd000 - Very Helpful Sep 29 '02
kane07 - Somewhat Helpful Jul 22 '02
search66 - Most Helpful Jul 09 '02
atamogaokashii - Very Helpful Aug 04 '02

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Check out the other contributors at http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/sleeper54/rewrite/writers.html

Recommended: No

Movie Mood: Scary Movie
Worst Part of this Film: Script