PLAYBACK

I am sure you have heard about certain cultures who believe in the notion that having your photo taken results in part of your soul being ensnared. With that in mind, it follows that if a moving image of a human is captured, the consequences would be more severe. It is this mythical premise that forms the basis for PLAYBACK, a movie from director Michael A. Nickles.

The narrative stems from Louis Le Prince, an occultist, who allegedly predated even Edison when he shot a 3 second ‘movie’ back in the 1800’s. But with Prince’s cinematic success the upshot of dabbling in the Black Arts, his future family are obliged to indulge in occult sacrifices in order to satisfy his spiritual blood lust.

The most recent example of this occurred in 1994, when Prince’s great, great, great, great grandson slaughtered his step sister (after getting her pregnant) along with his parents. The unsavoury incident is now referred to as the ‘Diehl Family Murders’ and is an episode salient enough to warrant being the topic of a project for Julian (Jonny Pacar), a journalism student.

Along with his girlfriend, Riley (Ambyr Childers) and a few buddies, they attempt to recreate the tragic Diehl Family incident in a (semi) gory zero budget mini movie.

It is here that Quinn (Toby Hemmingway) enters proceedings. The solvent abusing older former acquaintance of Julian works at the local TV news station and loans him the recording equipment. But it’s not just cameras Julian wants. He could REALLY do with a break at the station. Quinn denies this request but is far more obliging to the local police officer Frank Lyons (Christian Slater - YES Mr True Romance himself!). It seems Lyons has a penchant for ogling the local female teenage fraternity, and Quinn is just the creep to obtain such secretive locker room recordings.

But there is more to Quinn then simply a junkie with a dead end job. It seems Quinn can possess and control the people he has filmed when viewing the playback and touching the screen with his hand. I know I know, this has more than a familiar "RING" to it but hey!

It transpires that Quinn’s agenda is not simply to make an illicit buck on the side. He needs the police archive footage of ‘The Diehl Family Murders’ for his own nefarious purposes and Lyons is just the bent cop to obtain it for him.

Meanwhile, Julian’s project is running out of time, and his mother, who happens to be a police lieutenant and Lyons boss to boot, is getting increasingly edgy about her son covering such a nasty topic. It doesn’t stop Julian delving further into the grisly story of the Diehl’s fate and, as such, visits the now abandoned property where the murders took place.

These two threads of the narrative are now spliced together as a ghostly and bloody climax reveals the truth behind the legendary murders and Louis Le Prince’s bloodline…

I have watched a few ‘After Dark’ offerings from UK distributer G2 Pictures over the last few months with mixed feelings. They are mostly polished modern horror flicks aimed at the teenage demographic. I was therefore pleasantly surprised with the brutally violent opening scenes to PLAYBACK, whereby the original ‘Diehl Family Murder’ is depicted. It was vicious stuff laden with splatter and cruelty which served to grab the attention of the viewer.

Such a malicious opening bought the picture some time as the fairly mundane characters are introduced. Nate (Jonathan Keltz) only became interesting once he was possessed while DeeDee (Jennifer Missoni) and Brianna Baker (Alessandra Torresani) play out a typical good sis / bad sis duo (With ‘bad’ meaning incredibly cute, feisty and rebellious in Torresani’s case!). Quinn’s menace became more plausible as the movie progressed and Slater’s casting as the pervy cop at least broke the stereotypical mould that all paedophiles are middle aged, bald and pot-bellied!

The gore was surprisingly impressive. Even though the opening scene was never surpassed for nastiness, the movies gradual progression, effectively into a slasher picture, at least provided a platform for throats to be cut, bullets to disintegrate craniums and skulls to be skewered.

But as the bodies piled up (no bad thing in itself) the movie seemed to meander between eerily supernatural and a traditional slashfest.

Ultimately what shackled the movie was the atmosphere. Some dark subject matter is dealt with but the slick production gave the picture a little too much gloss for it to be effectual in a scary sense.

Another little niggle was the manner in which Quinn set up the supposedly surreptitious cameras. In this age of pinhole digital recorders, violating a cuddly toy and substituting its button nose for the lens the size of a penny seemed a little too fanciful for my liking. At one point I even thought such a crude attempt at furtive filming meant the movie was set a decade or so back. But when the footage was passed to Lyons on miniscule USB flashdrive, it told me otherwise!

Overall an interesting, if not completely original, themed teen horror that could have been so much better had Nickles traded glamour for grit.

Review by Marc Lissenburg