Strict Narrative Logicians Beware! —
This low budget horror is a movie filled with prime examples of what sort of mistakes a new director can make, which includes the writing as both came from documentary filmmaker and author, Tariq Nasheed. Now, when you realise that Tariq was lauded by critics for his documentary filmmaking, it comes as, somewhat of a surprise that he couldn’t quite transfer that invigorating frankness of style, to feature filmmaking. The Eugenist suffered in a few areas but the writing is a large part of the problem, and effectively hobbled this production from the outset.
I find it odd that it took not one, but two writers to get it this wrong, by not logically thinking the character actions through to their conclusions, they created a barrier of incredulity that couldn’t be climbed. For example, a majority of the story is in the school, meaning it is of great import. Why didn’t Nasheed or co-writer Aaron Strongoni take the time to think of a plausible reason for a group of clean-cut young adults to break into a recently abandoned school? Why would a school be this hard to break out of? Why is there no signal for anyones phone? And to confirm this, Nyell Segura’s character Sean, asks the group “Does anyone have any (phone) service?”, “this can’t be possible!”. Never a truer word spoken, it most certainly can’t be possible, not the way this script is written.
*****
The cast are all relatively new to the business and is most telling, in some more than others, but it didn’t help matters at all. The acting was very wooden at times and when any sort of dialogue was going on between any of the guys (the women were far better than the men) it wasn’t good to watch. The thing that stood out and was very good, was the title sequence at the start, as the titles were overlaid on top of some gruesome, but very interesting images of severely deformed kids…
People make movies for all sorts of reasons, making some form of statement, social, political or otherwise. But mostly films are made to entertain, and in almost all cases, to make us think. This then makes us ask the question, why did Tariq Nasheed make this film? Sadly, it looks to me like a simple case of trying to make money, because there wasn’t a single thing in this uncostly, unscary, rather short movie which spoke of hidden talent. Admittedly, most new directors don’t get it right the first time, and only need a way to express themselves, but if that were the case here, we would be able to detect it and offer critique accordingly, however this isn’t a simple case of ‘art for art’s sake’. If only.
Don’t knock yourselves out over this one. Try watching The Faculty instead
Grade: D+
by Nav Qateel
