Categories
Film Reviews

Red Mist

Revolver Entertainment

Following on from the huge success of horror flick Shrooms back in 2007, director Paddy Breathnach has another disturbing success about to explode onto movie screens called Red Mist.

Red Mist begins when Kenneth (Andrew Lee Potts), a dissolute and recluse hospital janitor with a passion for taking voyeuristic mobile phone photographs and video, catches a group of medical students drinking and taking drugs. When he confronts the students, they drug him and when he goes into an epileptic fit do nothing to save his life. While in a coma, one particular medical student, Catherine (Arielle Kebbel), gets a fit of guilt and conjures up a cocktail of drugs hoping to bring him out of the coma. Instead, he has various out of body episodes where he can possess individuals to take revenge on his tormentors.

Following in the footsteps of Pathology with the notion of medical students experimenting with drink and drugs, I am beginning to wonder if medical students in reality are in any ways similar to those on screen or have they actually been studying and know the effects such narcotics could have on a person. I dread the thought of being admitted to hospital and finding out the truth.

Red Mist is the seventh film from director Paddy Breathnach and he has done remarkably well in his use of cinematography. Some scenes have overexposure lighting; others are extremely bright, while some are practically darkened with only the main character in their current position in view, like silhouettes in a darkened frame. There are certainly the occasional jumps that wait in store for viewers. There are also the odd bloody and violent images, but not as much as you may expect for a classicised horror flick. The murder scenes are not very graphic and I was hoping for much more of a gore fest than I was given.

This is an American film with a majority American cast, filmed in Ireland and has an Irish director. The majority of sets involved are inside, a hospital, a bar, university campus and dorm rooms with the only real outdoor set being a wood. What I cannot make out is although these are generic sets which could have been filmed anywhere, why film in Ireland and pretend its in American rather than just film in America? At least with Shrooms a viewer knew the American students were vacationing in Ireland and not falsely given a wrong setting. Even so, since the locations are generic, the sets are plausible and if you hadn’t had known could easily be fooled into thinking the scenes were filmed in the USA.

Red Mist is an interesting film with a fascinating narrative with the unconscious becoming alive and possessing others to take revenge from the deathbed. It concludes with an open ending, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a sequel in the works over the next year…and who knows where this one will be filmed.

Michelle Moore