I think it started back in 2002 with director Marc Evans’ ‘My Little Eye’, the whole Internet streaming murder thingy genre movie. Since then there have been a spate of these little Internet streaming horror type movies, the majority – if not all – of these movie being of the Straight to DVD variety. Into this genre we toss this flick ‘Death on Demand’ with combines a whole bunch of genres into its movie soup, which probably would have been a little better if the men behind the camera could have found some people in front of the camera who were a little more competent.

The film opens amidst a scenic background with a news story overlaid telling the story of Ice mountain hiker Sean McIntyre, who was found after being trapped for a number of days, and apparently had gone completely bonkers, killing his hiking partner and a few others since the hypothermia obviously froze up his brain cavity. Though I’m no mental health professional, I’m thinking that perhaps my man should be mentally institutionalized like forever, instead of say… sending him home to his wife and kids for thanksgiving dinner and giving him a knife to carve a turkey. But again, I’m no mental health professional. As one would imagine our demented mountain climber Sean McIntyre (Jerry Broome) kills up everybody in the house and then proceeds to hang himself. I would say McIntyre’s estate should file a lawsuit against these lousy Mental Health Professionals, but alas, everybody associated with McIntyre’s estate is dead now.

Twenty years later Richard (Dan Falcone) has a dream to be rich. The plan is to rig the long abandoned McIntyre house with cameras and have three horny couples stay the night, on Halloween no less, and look for clues to find their way out for 5000 dollars in prize money. Staying in a house where a bunch of people were slaughtered would normally be no problem (I guess) until somebody breaks out a Ouija board. I don’t know much but I do know that in low budget slasher flicks this is an action that should

NEVER be taken. Folks, if you’re ever at a party and somebody breaks out a Ouija board, chances are you’re in a low budget slasher flick and you should exit stage left as fast as possible. Anyway, after the séance, Sean McIntyre shows up with all of his mountain climbing weapons to hunt down our crazy kids who consist of a porn star with big fake breast, an impotent football player, his super horny girlfriend with cute little natural breasts, a LUG (lesbian until graduation), our mystical final girl and her disbelieving boyfriend. Oh, and Richard is in the house monitoring things with his African American tech buddy Pete (Terron Jones). Other than the fact that he thinks everybody he sees is a Yeti, McIntyre isn’t all that crazy. One by one these crazy kids start disappearing, at least pieces of them do, leaving our mystical final girl desperate to send the confused restless spirit of Sean McIntyre back where it came… inside a jacked up looking Raggedy Ann doll.

You know it’s very easy to watch some movie and then proclaim ‘It sucked’, or ‘it was crap’ or ‘this was shite’. Though we here at the FCU have absolutely no legitimacy as real film critics, we still try to give reasons why some things are crap. ‘Death on Demand’ for instance has a couple of things working in its favor with one being that it has a real cool title. Also working for this movie is that director Adam Matalon in more than a few scenes of his film has crafted some scenes that have a decent amount of atmosphere and dread built into them. This can’t be an easy feat since looking at Mr. Matalon’s filmography one will observe that he has done a bit of Sesame Street work, so going from Grover and Elmo and transitioning to big fake tits and ice picks to the skull can’t be an easy move. Grover’s like my main dog. I had this stuffed Grover when I was a kid… but that’s another story for another day.

Unfortunately the actors that the director had to work with in this film didn’t do him too many favors. Most of the acting was fairly stiff or was full of wide eyed over the top wild gesturing. They were all good looking kids though, but with the probable exception of Jerry Broome’s McIntyre, who was a fairly effective creepy killer, and the possible exception of Dan Falcone’s smarmy fledgling Internet Tycoon, these kids really struggled to sell this story to the audience. But to defend the young pretty actors in this movie just a little bit, the script that they were working with didn’t do them many favors either. The dialog was forced and didn’t come off as the least bit natural. There were the occasional attempts of humor that really didn’t work all that well and there were small efforts to give our characters a little bit of substance, but considering this consisted of a dude who can’t get a hard-on and a guy who got kicked off the football team, there wasn’t a hell of lot there to work with. And don’t get me started on the final death scene which was utterly and completely ridiculous.

Somewhere in the running time of this movie was a mediocre slasher flick fighting like hell to get out, but unfortunately the bad acting, failed humor terrible final death scene in ‘Death on Demand’ keeps mediocrity at bay, yielding only mildly disappointing crap.