Friday, October 2, 2015

Dead Body (LSFF 2015) - Movie Review



Dead Body is an official selection of the Northwest Film Forum's Local Sightings Film Festival. This locally produced film was written by Ian Bell and Ramon Isao, was directed by Bobbin Ramsey, and stars Rachel Brun, Jay Myers, Cooper Hopkins, Nathan Pringle, Leah Pfenning, Nic Morden, Spencer Hamp, Miho Aizawa, and Keo Sakuta.


The Story:
Nine graduating high school students join together at a secluded cabin in the woods to celebrate the next step in their lives. Tension between some of the members of the group begins to boil over so of course the solution is to play a "who done it" type of game called Dead Body. What none of them expected was for the game to become a real struggle of life and death as bodies begin to pile up for real and the only questions are who is behind the killing and who will survive.


The Review:
The writers of this movie have unearthed yet another new twist on the cabin in the woods sub genre of horror films and director Bobbin Ramsey does a great job of translating it all to the screen. On one hand, you can really tell that this is a small, low budget, indie project although the ideas are big and the execution is spot on so the end result is actually quite entertaining. That being said, there is an obvious familiarity to the story and the twists and turns end up being very predictable although not in a way that detracts from the storytelling. I believe this is in part due to the cast members who all seem to have completely bought into what this film is trying to accomplish in living on that knife edge of playing the genre straight or letting it fall into parody.

The Verdict:
Dead Body is the type of film that you hope will gain some legs on the festival circuit as it's not likely to earn major distribution just for the fact that it is such a low budget feature to begin with. Hopefully this is just the beginning for the creative team behind this film and we will get to see many more examples of their work down the road.




 


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