Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Joseph Scrimshaw
If you know anything about the Scariest Things Podcast, it’s that we love our physical media. Well, most of us love physical media. OK, truth be told, I love physical media.
VHS, Beta, DVD, BluRay, 4K, 35 mm. Bring it on. It’s the best there is, until it isn’t.
In the new horror comedy, Dead Media, director Joseph Scrimshaw explores this very concept. Is it better to unwind by mindless scrolling through a seemingly endless array of streaming options, or will you be rewarded by exploring the dark recesses of the Salvation Army to find that perfectly imperfect VHS copy of The Mutilator?
There’s no right answer, but we all know there really is. It’s this juxtaposition that’s at the heart of Dead Media. The film follows an oafish Gen-X uncle, Uncle Heppy (Sam Landman) who decides to crash his niece Maggie’s (Sammi-Jack Martincak) movie night with her two pals.
When Uncle Heppy gets world that his niece would dare stream the unimpeachable horror classic, Night of the Lurchers, in lieu of watching a dusty physical media copy, he races, or rather trundles, to her house to treat her and her pals Brenda (Jessica Fenton) and Daniel (Antonio Teodoro) to a movie viewing treat that they’ll never forgot.
The film follows a conceit that’s not often deployed — the film within a film. A tricky one for sure. When the film within a film works, it really works. When it doesn’t work it’s a weird and clunky affair that largely leaves viewers confused and bored with the tiresome exposition.
Good news! Not unlike 1985’s Demons where a group of random people are invited to a screening of a mysterious movie, only to find themselves trapped in the theater with ravenous demons, Dead Media reveals a very similar plot. The distinction is that Dead Media delivers in an entirely unique and clever way.
After Uncle Heppy forces Maggie, Brenda, and Daniel to watch Night of the Lurchers, the trailers, the interviews, the screen tests, and the myriad of DVD extras (that you WON’T find on the streaming version), he tells Maggie about the one remaining extra. Uncle Heppy explains that there’s a hidden extra that contains a cosmic connection that no one has been able to crack.
After Uncle Heppy passes out, Maggie, partially tired and stoned, puts her musical talents to use and figures out that the DVD extra is unlocked by a specific series of notes that can be replicated within the DVD menu. Again, in case you were wondering, a DVD menu is something you won’t find on the streaming version of the film.
As soon as Maggie plugs in the correct sequence she’s immediately greeted with a psychedelic cavalcade of images, colors, and memories. Unfortunately, the DVD menu also connects her to the inner workings of the film, and the Lurchers. The zombie-like creatures, the actors, the film’s director, and the person interviewing the film’s director in the DVD extras, all come to life.
Maggie and Uncle Heppy quickly realize that much like the film itself, there are rules to fighting the Lurchers and surviving. Their survival becomes something of a time/space puzzle where the DVD extras randomly replicate themselves throughout their house. Sometimes they’re in the middle of funny outtakes and sometimes they’re on the verge of having their souls swallowed by the Lurchers.
As Maggie and Uncle Heppy try to unearth the meaning behind this cosmic mystery, the film’s director, Rita Nast (Anna Sundberg), discloses that this was all part of her master plan to both a) escape the clutches of a male-dominated film industry, and b) allow her to be immortalized forever in an 7×5” DVD hard case.
Familial relations, roommate interpersonal dealings, and their nostalgic weaknesses all get exposed in the final act as Maggie and Uncle Heppy work to defeat the…LURCHERS!
Should you see Dead Media?
This low budget affair is impressive on multiple fronts. The true camaraderie among the roommates and Uncle Heppy is fun, authentic, and most importantly, believable. All the actors play perfectly against type and each other in a symbiotic and silly fashion.
Even though the film all takes place in a single home, and what appears to be a junior college auditorium, that’s not its weakness. The weakness, and surprisingly it’s really just one thing, is the fact that the film’s wild cosmic mishmash of time and space gets a little long in the tooth.
Funny enough, the film pokes fun at the fact that in the modern era it’s only horror films that have the ability to stay under an hour and 30 minute run time. How long is Dead Media? One hour and 39 minutes. Maybe, just maybe, nine minutes too long.
Dead Media is in theaters on July 16 and available on VOD July 28. Here’s to hoping that there’s a VHS print set to hit the streets in the near future.