Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

The Girl, who we will eventually call Princess because she can’t remember her name and as played by the bountiful Bobbie Sue Luther, wakes up this particular evening in a funeral home in a casket. Or a Death Box as she will irritatingly call it throughout this movie ‘Laid to Rest’. Waking up in a sealed casket just is not cool. Princess will eventually get of this Death Box and attempt to make her way out of this mortuary… she called the mortuary something silly too by the way. Anyway, while on her short journey Princess will stumble upon the reason she was in the Death Box in the first place, this being the completely oppressive force of our villain for today, a Chrysler 300 driving fool of unstoppable serial killing power calling himself Chrome Skull. Princess isn’t your average hapless damsel as she does this Chrome Skull cat some damage before making her way out to the street where she is picked up by the kindly Tucker (Kevin Gage) and taken to his home where she meets Tucker’s loving, albeit suspicious wife Cindy (Lena Headey).

In the history of unknown bad decisions, Tucker picking Princess off of the street is near the top as Chrome Skull finds out where Tucker lives and proceeds to make Tucker a widow in a most horrific way. Horrible. Just horrible. Tucker luckily temporarily disables this dude as he runs away like a screaming bitch, with Princess in tow, as they seek assistance.

So they make it to the next closest house. Note that Tucker’s truck is out of gas, there are no nearby gas stations, his home phone was cut off months ago and he has no cell phone. Something to keep in mind in this odd little town. At this next house they beg the assistance of the ultra geeky Steven (Sean Whalen) who also has no land line in addition to no cell phone but he does have a car with gas, though it goes at a max thirty miles an hour. Steven is mourning death of his elderly mother who I’m guessing fell down or something and since their home has no land line and no one has a cell phone, the poor woman had no other option except to die.

So our heroes jump into Steven’s slow boat ride and head to the police station. Not a lot good happening there. Now what? I know let’s go back to the mortuary. Why? Hell if know. Not really a lot good happening there either. Now what? Let’s go to the mini-mart. There are reasons to go there but they are pretty stupid. Regardless the time has come for our heroine, along with our heroes and a few other disposables to make a stand against this guy. Whoever the hell this guy is.

Maybe last year or thereabouts we saw a movie called ‘The Rage’ which was directed by noted Hollywood makeup artist Robert Kurtzman and without a doubt the best thing about that movie was the completely disgusting makeup effects. This movie is directed by noted makeup artist Robert Hall and without a doubt the best thing about this movie are the horrific makeup special effects. Just horrible. The Kurtzman movie was done in by that cat being saddled with some of the worst actors known to man. Not a problem with this movie because if somebody were to let me make a movie Kevin Gage would be one of the first people I’d beg to be in my movie and we are Lena Headey apologist over here at the FCU since we honestly believe that Lena Headey’s dookey don’t stink. Even though she wasn’t in this movie all that long.

But even though we did ultimately like this movie, it does have its issues. You see while we are fully comfortable with the knowledge that people in horror movies have to behave a certain way to keep things going, the completely unrealistic characters in this movie might’ve gone a bit overboard on this element. This might’ve been done on purpose as a comedic element perhaps, but if so it wasn’t all that funny. Anytime a character needed to do something that made sense, like go to a crowded town to get help, the characters in this movie always opted for the much stupider thing, which usually involved being all alone with a sliver masked super strong lunatic. Chief amongst these was the vacuous Princess who seemed way more intent on remembering who she was as opposed to staying alive. You would think she’d have a lifetime to gradually remember stuff. And I know this is a small town and all but most small towns have at least one gas station run by that lonely freaky dude. And even homeless people have Metro PCS cell phones. What’s up with that? I dug how this villain makes his living videotaping murders but somehow he lets himself run out of video tapes. Talk about an ill-prepared serial killer, not that we’re going to learn a damn thing about that guy and this movie.

But that’s all splitting hairs. The gore effects in this flick are easily some of the most horrific gore effects ever. Just horrible. And while the story in this movie was fractured and inconsistent, it held together just well enough to bracket the outstandingly horrific gore effects.

As work of cinema ‘Laid to Rest’ seems almost incomplete, and with just a little more attention to detail, that is outside of sawing peoples heads of with dull knives which was very detail oriented, it had the potential to be really, really good, considering it’s great look and nice cast of actors. As it stands now however it is more of curiosity that almost any self-respecting fan of horror has to see just for the pure spectacle of it all.