“DEAD LINE” (2006)

Starring: Adriel Joy, Kristin Burke, John Carlo Alvarez & David Zahedian
Written & Directed by Michelle Fatale
Official Website

Polly Staffle Rating: **

People complain all the time that women directors never get the recognition they deserve. The simple fact is there just aren’t that many female filmmakers. There are more now than ever, but men probably still out number them at least 20-1. I personally like a number of female filmmakers. Doris Wishman (“Bad Girls Go to Hell”) is of course my absolute favorite, but I also think Rebecca Miller (“Angela”) is pretty damn good and Miranda July (“You and Me and Everyone We Know”) has the potential to do a lot of really great movies. She may very well be a better writer than director, but I am extremely interested in what project she does next. I also think it’s possible Asia Argento (“The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things”) could be the best female director working once she comes into her own and matures as a storyteller.

Wishman dabbled in horror a bit, but she mostly made exploitation films and to my knowledge there haven’t really been any women filmmakers that solely focused on the genre. Then comes along Michelle Fatale. It probably goes with out saying, but I was tremendously pumped to check out her little movie called “Dead Line.”

Though there is some good here, “Dead Line” is not going to help give female directors more recognition. In fact, from a technical stand point, this movie is quite awful. Specifically the sound. Whoever was responsible for the sound should never work with audio on another film. I’ve seen plenty of no-budget films and I have come to accept bad audio quality from time to time, but here it almost made the movie unwatchable. But what this 30-minute slasher does show us is female writers working in horror can bring some new perspectives to overused horror elements.

What we have here is your average four college kids at a cabin in the woods movie. There’s the virginal goodie too shoes female character. Her name is Jane (Adriel Joy). Then there’s Nikki (Kristin Burke) - the wild sex and drug obsessed best friend. On the male side, the characters are Andrew (John Carlo Alvarez), your typical too-cool-for-school, wearing sunglasses at night Mr. Insensitive, and Glen (the Shaquille O’Neal-esque David Zahedian), a rich kid player used to banging cheerleaders now dating the prude girl Jane.

My biggest complaint as far as the script is Fatale starts off by giving us stereotypical characters and then spending 16 minutes of the short trying to give them a little depth. I felt she wasted way too much time trying to develop these characters which you know she is only going to kill anyway. Horror movies, especially slashers, do not need deep characters that seem like real humans. The other thing is, I felt the more Fatale tried to develop these people, it ended up being just more time wasted playing up to their stereotypes.

I also felt there were way too many nods to the “Evil Dead Trilogy,” including a very bad and out of place moment when Andrew actually says “groovy.” I also felt the Lizzie Borden reference was a bit misplaced. It wasn't really explored, but kind of just thrown in. Now before I get into any of the things I did like about the film I also wanted to point out a moment that really just took me out of the story. There is some kind of secret in Jane’s past that is haunting her and while she is out in the middle of nowhere she starts getting prank phone calls. Jane starts to think everyone is in danger and recommends they all get the hell out of the woods and go home. No one wants to, so she gets pissed off and leaves the cabin to walk alone in the woods. Am I missing something here? She thinks maybe there’s a crazy madman on the loose, stalking the woods, watching the cabin and she wants to leave, but she doesn’t get her way, so she goes for a casual stroll alone without a weapon? That didn’t sit right with me at all and probably bothered me more than the “groovy” scene.

Okay, now that all the bad stuff is out of the way, there really are some enjoyable elements here. I loved the ending. Fatale gives us a little twist on the slasher film and it’s not quite “High Tension” and it’s not something you don’t see coming, but I dug it. Something else Fatale does is interject some real issues such as sexual abuse and infidelity which your typical teens getting killed film doesn’t always offer. I also liked the different take on the gore and nudity scenes. You can just tell there is a woman behind the camera when instead of getting a naked female we get a male’s back side during the sex scene. I admit I figured there would have been a bit more romance than is offered, but this is a horror movie we are talking about. As far as gore, most of the fatalities take place off camera. In fact, one of two death scenes that happen in our vision cuts to a red Quentin Tarantino-like screen instead of showing somebody’s head getting split open with an axe. The other on-screen death is a person getting hit with a car. Male horror directors tend to go for more personal kills with masked-men lopping someone’s head off with a machete, especially during or right after a sex act.

Overall I think I would say Michelle Fatale, who also edited and produced the film, had a decent vision here and knew what she wanted. The execution though is a bit on the poor side. This film could have easily been chopped down to ten minutes. It’s a short, so waiting 20 minutes before the body count starts is a bit much. In the mean time, the characters basically felt like they were taken from previous horror films and none of them were really likeable so I got a bit bored. Fatale does give us a strong finish, however, and although I thought for sure the title was never going to make any sense, everything clicks together in the end. I definitely hope she gives the genre another try and think with a little practice she could be a decent horror filmmaker.

- CCF, July 2006