Unrest.

Right, with the rest of the Trancers series in the post, let's take a look at another After Dark horror flick, enjoy!

This film was shown in the same festival as Penny Dreadful and picked up a handful of awards at other festivals that year. It's notable to mention the film was shot in a real morgue, with real dead bodies, although not the first of its kind like it claims.

Unrest is a film that never really comes together, by the hour mark it's picked up a handful of interesting things, spirits, belief systems, Aztec Gods, psychosis and psychic powers but none of it really does anything, it's all just window dressing or plot devices. I mean when you think back, a lot does happen in the film, but actually watching it...it just feels so slow, like it's amazing just how much happens when you think back, because it feels like nothing has happened at all. So there is a morgue, some pathology students and a weird corpse. Our protagonist, Alison, starts to obsess over the weird corpse and begins to try and piece together her past - then crazy shit starts going down. Even the twist that the cadaver was a murderer on death row surrounded by thousands of angry spirits comes in around twenty minutes away from the end, this isn't the Usual Suspects, your twist isn't clever enough to practically be the climax of the film.

I am going to say Unrest is probably the worst paced film I have ever seen, although action, story and character development does happen in the first hour, a majority of everything in this film happens in the last twenty minutes. The first hour has so much going on and so little sense of focus, we tend to get snippet scenes like a sketch show as the film jumps all around everywhere trying to form a plot and because each scene is so brief, it ends up feeling like nothing is actually happening at all. I don't even get why it needs to be so slow, you are in a real morgue, do you really need to spend so much time setting atmosphere? There is pretty  much no such thing as a location that can't be twisted to being creepy, but a morgue is a location creepy from the get go, you could just stick a camera in a morgue at night and make us watch and we'll probably have nightmares for weeks, you don't need to try and construct all this atmosphere, construct all these non-scares and other such tricks, it's just pointless and your film is suffering because of it, pretty much the whole first hour could have been cut down to about fifteen minutes, all the rest is just cock teasing and set up for something that needs neither. And it's a shame, because the second act starts with a really emotional moment and a surprisingly good performance from Jay Jablonski, but it lacks any real weight because we know nothing about this guy or his fiancé, they were too busy wasting the time they could have spent on that having the camera wander around dark corridors.

About the only thing about the first hour that is really all that interesting is that, although never actually flat out saying so, it seems to be trying to make us not believe in Alison. We know she freaked and threw up when she saw the body and it seems that only she is having the strange occurrences like she's just got the jitters and nothing is happening at all... it could have probably made for a more interesting film if they kept this up longer. But nope, really was Aztec Gods and evil spirits, yo!

So glad to be back to the low-budget horror scene, all that gloriously amateurish acting and construction. The best actor in the whole thing gets basically benched barely half way through it. And to be fair all the atmosphere set up is pretty decent...if we weren't in a scary location already.

Unrest barely counts as a horror film, the cockteases don't really count as scare tactics and it isn't like it puts in scares...but they aren't scary, there just generally isn't any. They go on so much about how scary their location is, that it undermines how scary the location really is, because we can't appreciate it with the film screaming it in our faces all the time. About the only scare the film really has is the use of real corpses, but even then it's more of a ew than a argh!

So do I recommend it? Unrest just feels so sluggish that it becomes incredibly boring. A lot happens, but it's just told in such an unfocused manner most of it will probably never register. Unrest already had a great setting, so they didn't need to waste an hour rubbing our faces in it but for once I can't even say, 'it's a shame because there were some good ideas here', there weren't. Underneath the boredom is a shitty story, shitty characters, an underwritten script and an all round terrible movie. Avoid.

Think About It!

-Locke