I have two more to go.  Or is it three?  I can’t remember.  Over the past year I’ve been trudging through the ‘After Dark horror fest flicks, 8 films to die for’ and have just finished watching Jason Todd Ipsen’s ‘Unrest’.  The hook for this film is that it features real live cadavers, considering it takes place in the midst of a Gross Anatomy class at an unnamed Medical school.  The thing that is cool about what Lionsgate has done with this program is that it saved eight films from certain DTV obscurity, though I would have seen them anyway, and have given these films a larger audience and more exposure as they eventually make their way to the video store shelves.  But with the exception of ‘The Abandoned’, none of these films have particularly acquitted themselves too worthy for anything other than DTV, though none of the ones I’ve seen have been really bad.  But none, ‘The Abandoned’ included, have been really good either.

Corri English is Med student Allison Blanchard.  Now I was sad to see that the pretty miss English was the ‘Hero Girl’ in this flick because standing at barely 5ft. and having a pretty awesome rack, her being the hero girl meant that she wasn’t going to get naked in this film.  If I was making a horror flick, I would either cast somebody super plain as the hero girl and have hordes of hotties be the whoring types who get naked and die, or I would flip the genre and make the hero girl a hottie who also likes to get naked and screw which would shock the watchers of my film as my Hero Girl / whore survives until the end.  That’s just what I would do.  Wait!  I forgot that the movie starts with two hospital employees unboxing a cadaver from Brazil.  One of the employees is a black guy.  He gets killed almost even before the opening credits finish rolling, which is good because now that we got the dead black guy out of the way we can start our movie without worrying about when the black guy is going to die.

So our med student are about to cut into their cadavers, but Allison starts to trip because she has some kind of weird psychic ability and knows that there is something wrong with her cadaver.  Soon people start dying, and though the hospital finds it peculiar that there are a large number of people dying in close relation to this class, including some it’s students, class goes on.  Allison’s new boyfriend, fellow med student Brian Cross (Scot Davis) thinks his new girlfriend is a little crazy with all of her evil Brazilian Cadaver talk, but she’s way too hot to just kick to the curb so he suffers along with her, even when she asks him to jump into a pool of formaldehyde to fish out a dead body.  That stuff is toxic isn’t it?  Girlfriend ain’t THAT hot.  It soon becomes obvious that evil is certainly afoot and we begin to ask ourselves how many dead people have to end up in that freaking formaldehyde tank before the Dean finally SUSPENDS CLASSES?

‘Unrest’ wasn’t so bad truth be told as director Jason Todd Ipson, if nothing else, has created a very ominous atmosphere in his film that dripped with dread.  The performances by the actors where fine for this genre, though Corri English played probably the worlds worst doctor.  I sure hope Allison eventually failed that Gross Anatomy class.  The romance between the two leads seemed completely unnecessary and tacked on, and would only be justifiable if it was used to get our star girl all naked and stuff in a gratuitous love scene, of which there wasn’t one.  Director Ipson probably should have kept their relationship platonic to keep things moving.  Also allow me to give special mention Jessica Alba’s baby brother Joshua who does fine work as another medical student, though he’s not nearly as hot as his sister.  Sadly, Joshua looks like a minority and his fate in this movie, and any other horror movie he show up in is pretty much sealed, until he manages to become a star of course.

I didn’t particularly care for the narrative of ‘Unrest’ as I just didn’t find the story too terribly compelling or interesting.  And though the atmosphere was fantastic, it still didn’t lend itself to very many frights or scares from where I was sitting.  The movie tended to drag in points and possibly could have stood for a little tighter editing to compress the action and keep things flowing.

Certainly one of the better ‘After Dark’ horror film, ‘Unrest’ had some positive things working in its favor, with the bottom line being that it WAS entertaining despite it’s flaws.  Though I still give the nod to ‘The Abandoned’ as the pick of the litter of those I have seen thus far, I don’t think anyone who watches ‘Unrest’ will be too upset at that time spent.