Film Review: DEAD MARY (2007) *** and a 1\2 out of *****

(c) Peace Arch

This low-key, low-budget horror film is a strange creature. At a glance, it looks like an Evil Dead/Cabin Fever rip-off, with a bunch of young folk staying at a cabin in the woods for a long weekend, only to discover, after one of them is found brutally murdered in the woods, that there is an otherworldly killer amongst them. But as it turns out, Dead Mary is quite a bit more than that.

The film begins with a lengthy sequence introducing us to the cast of characters (which range from the unfaithful husband, to a guy who just broke up with his girlfriend, to the newbie girlfriend of one of the guys, who feels like an outsider, to the strong-willed young woman who flirts with the boyfriend of one of her friends), then shifts gears to become something similar to Invasion of The Body Snatchers, with a shape-shifting creature picking the characters off one by one. Then it shifts gears once more to become an apocalyptic thriller similar to The Thing. That's not to say that any of these aspects of the story is fully fleshed out or realized on a large scale. Far from it. This is a low-budget film, with almost no effects, and with minimal locations. So do the filmmakers pull it off? Yes. In spades.

Thanks to Robert Wilson's assured and stylish direction, which is pretty old-school, Peter Sheldrick and Christopher Warre Smets's solid script, and the young cast's earnest performances, the film turns out to be an effective and ambitious effort that manages to maintain the suspense throughout the whole running time, provide a couple of truly disturbing sequences, create an atmosphere of foreboding, and end on a darkly humorous and ambiguous note, things which many similar films with higher budgets fail to pull off (Cabin in The Woods, anyone?).

Although the plot is far from original, and the film has some pacing and script hiccups along the way, this is a minor classic that is entertaining and fresh.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2011-2022.

Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of several short films and a feature, which was released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon. He is also the host of The Dark Fantastic Podcast. Find him on Twitter @AFKhalifa and on Facebook @Dark.Fantastic.AK·Writer

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