Dead Tone

This movie has a quite good promising concept for a genre movie. It's a slasher in which lots of people are getting killed randomly by a serial killer. Like many genre movies before the movie uses phone-calls as its main concept. It's something which always works out well for horror/thriller movies. Nothing wrong with the phone-class but everything else about the movie is just way below par.

I purely watch these kind of movies because of Rutger Hauer. Even though the movies are always horrible, his presence still gives the movies always something special. But like always, his role is far too small. Perhaps if he was the main lead the movie would still had been more bearable. It now is as if he plays in a totally different movie himself and has nothing to do with the main plot-line of the movie. Like his scenes were shot at a totally different phase of production. I bet he never ever even met most of the other actors and crew members involved with the movie.

One of the movie its problem are its characters. The movie is a slasher, so of course it features a bunch of university students, played of course by a bunch of actors who are close to- or even older than 30 years already. None of them are however likable or memorable. They are basically all the same and a bunch of typical stereotypes. I don't even know who all these characters were and what their names were. There are just too many characters in it and most of them are just asking to be killed.

The movie its story also just doesn't ever seem to get off the ground. The first halve of the movie is filled with many false scares. Way too many. The scare moments of the movie because of this start to become really ineffective. It even makes the movie more comical like at times than an horror movie. Not sure if this was the point of it all. It was Brian Hooks first and as of yet only directed movie. Besides that he also played the main lead and served as a producer and writer for the movie. He's obviously not the most talented person around in the business.

When the movie becomes more of a slasher and horror/thriller movie the movie becomes more watchable to watch for the genre fans, despite being formulaic and predictable with it all. No, it's just not the most exciting or scary genre movie around but there are also definitely worse of out there. The genre fans should be able to appreciate some of the gore and violence of the movie.

The movie soon however starts to get worse again as it heads toward its ending, when the movie is trying to be clever by trowing a couple of twists (what else is new?), which are just too far out there and don't work out well for the movie as a whole.

5ive/10en

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