AMUSEMENT - DVD review

When the DVD and Blu-ray editions of "Amusement" arrived simultaneously, I was a little puzzled. I figured it must be a fairly big movie to warrant such treatment, yet for the life of me I couldn't remember ever hearing the title. Turns out, Warner/New Line are releasing this 2008 fright flick directly to video. Shades of the Raw Feed series.

If a few minutes into the film you get the feeling you've seen it before, don't be surprised. "Amusement" has all the earmarks of most other familiar gore fests, like "Saw," "Jeepers Creepers," "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Friday the 13th," "Halloween," "The Last House on the Left," "Psycho," and their ilk. John Simpson directed "Amusement," and his last and only other movie was the thriller "Freeze Frame." Jake Wade Wall wrote the screenplay for "Amusement," and his previous movies were "When a Stranger Calls" and "The Hitcher." I think you can guess from the filmmakers involved what kind of movie it's going to be.

OK, so stop me if you've heard this one before: A psychotic killer with a maniacal laugh (Keir O'Donnell) lures beautiful young women and their friends into a rambling old mansion where he terrorizes, torments, tortures, mutilates, and murders them. What? You're stopping me already?

The film tells the stories of three childhood friends, now grown into their mid twenties, with each story seemingly unrelated to the others. Of course, it only takes a few minutes to realize that all three women in the movie have something more in common than just knowing one another in elementary school. Getting to that point of realization, though, is a long and tedious haul.

The first half of the film tells the stories of the three women; the last half pulls the stories together and makes us wish we hadn't watched the first half.

Initially, we meet Shelby Leds (Laura Breckenridge) and her boyfriend Rob (Tad Hilgenbrink), who are driving home late one evening in a freeway caravan of cars. A "caravan" in this case is a batch of drivers who aren't acquainted but follow one another in a group on the road. Little do Shelby and Rob know that one of the members of the caravan is the psycho killer. Naturally, they follow him.

Then we meet Tabitha Wright (Katheryn Winnick) in the best of the episodes. She's baby-sitting for her aunt in a new house she's never been in before. The segment involves dolls, which are always pretty scary. Tabitha doesn't think anything of a life-sized clown doll sitting in a rocking chair. I mean, who would think twice about being in a strange house and finding a six-foot clown doll with a TV remote in his hand?

Did I mention that all of the characters in this movie are idiots?

Finally, we meet Lisa, whose roommate has gone missing for the night. So she tracks the roommate to her last known location, an ancient hotel with no guests, situated in the middle of a huge old park and run by a fellow in a leather apron dripping blood. Does she go to the police? Nope. She sneaks into the hotel as any respectable horror-movie heroine would do. I tell you, these characters deserve everything they get.

After these introductions, the film goes downhill. Which is a neat trick, considering it had never gone uphill before. The rest of the story involves much endless chasing around in a maze of dank, medieval-like torture chambers and the inevitable gruesome scenes that ensue.

The film's highlights are its soundtrack, which generates more frights through its noises than the director can generate through his characters and action, and the set designs, which are appropriately spooky. Beyond these two items, there is nothing here we haven't seen before or want ever to see again. The characters engender no sympathy because we have nothing invested in them; we have no idea who they are beyond the fact that they are attractive. And the filmmakers use the movie as an excuse only to display as much mayhem, carnage, sadism, blood, and violence as possible, without the film's actually being all that sadistic, bloody, or violent. As I said before, an odd film.

"Amusement" finally ends without rhyme or reason, and completely lost me in doing so. Seriously, I have no idea what happened just before the big climax or why the main character got where she did. It's that kind of movie. Expect the filmmakers to try to scare you with shadows and dark places, but heaven forbid they should actually attempt to develop any tension or suspense.

Well, what did you expect from a direct-to-video horror flick, after all?

Video:
Warner/New Line present the film in two aspect ratios, 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen and 1.33:1 pan-and-scan full-screen on the same side of the disc. Needless to say, I watched in widescreen, but here's the thing: There aren't more than a couple of minutes of this movie that the filmmakers didn't shoot either at night (or simulating night) or inside a dim, murky set. As a result, most of the scenes look too dusky to admit much detail or definition. So don't expect bright, rich colors or any kind of precise delineation. Although the film never looks really bad in standard def, the image still looks rather ordinary, with a degree of soft blur throughout. There is a reasonably clean screen, though, except for some minor moire effects, and when the sun does shine, the hues show up reasonably well.

Audio:
The disc offers the soundtrack in Dolby Digital 5.1, and it is one of the high points of the film. Although it begins with a loud, raucous, pounding musical score, it calms down nicely once the story gets under way and then delivers some fine deep bass and some atmospheric surround sounds. For the most part, the soundtrack is scarier than the movie.

Extras:
At least you won't have to worry about missing anything among the extras on this disc. There are hardly any extras involved beyond the two screen formats. There are twenty-two scene selections; some trailers for other WB/New Line horror flicks at start-up; English as the only spoken language; Spanish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired. In addition, you do get access to a digital copy of the film, though (Windows Media compatible only; not compatible with Apple Macintosh and iPod devices).

Parting Shots:
Ho-hum, more of the same. Maniac terrorizes beautiful young women. All gothic and noisy and creepy and dark. "Amusement" is a cut below many of the others of its kind in that it makes practically no sense at all. There isn't even a breathe of humor or imagination in the thing to lighten the load. However, the segment with the dolls has its moments. Give the movie an extra point for that.