(Spoilers.) Sometimes the
question is not how a film ever got made, but why the film doesn't kill
someone's career. It is surprising that this dull and predictable and often
laughable slab of sub-generic horror didn't do exactly that to film's director
and co-scribe Jason Todd Ipson, but no, it apparently took his follow-up film
of the following year, Everybody Wants to Be Italian (2007 / trailer)
to do that, as his filmic production has (possibly thankfully) been
non-existent since then. That this aggravating slab of cinematic sludge has
apparently won some awards along the way is less a valid statement about its
quality than solid support of the old maxim that "You can never underestimate
the intelligence of the public."
Trailer to
Unrest:
Okay, in all
honesty, Ipson's direction is not all that lousy — he knows, for example, how
to frame shots, pan the camera, keep the narrative rolling in a comprehensible
manner and even, occasionally, infuse the scene with some mild dread. But he
never manages to truly make his predictable and often ridiculous movie either
all that interesting or scary — but then, the actual narrative itself offers so
many guffaw-drawing headscratchers and holes that Unrest is doomed from the
start.
The cinematic
tale concerns a rather bland Britney Spears-lookalike named Alison Blanchard
(Corri English of House of Fears [2007 / trailer],
Killer Pad [2008 / trailer],
Devil May Call [2013 / trailer]
and Faye [2021 / trailer])
who, aside from never taking her bra off, is a late addition to her medical
school where she dorms in a bleakly empty building and, during her first day in
Autopsy 101, promptly pukes and passes
out due to the unease she suddenly feels when confronted by the naked corpse of
the unknown female she and four male classmates are to dissect. Needless to
say, there is truly something behind her feelings of unease besides a queasy
stomach, and one by one the various people who come into contact with corpse
die bloody deaths.
A killer Aztec
ghost that writes "You're next" in blood in (not Nahuatl but) English in a history textbook? The
collected ashes, in an urn, of a body burnt in a school incinerator? A ghost
that kills anyone that it feels it has insulted its body but then only cuts off
the leg of the doctor that cuts it apart? A dead fat orderly that disappears
until the ghost sees fit to scare the main character by making his body
suddenly show up in a shower? Absolutely no logical follow up by the police or
figures of power despite events that would normally draw a swarm of officials
and/or press? People who literally swim in a tank of formaldehyde a couple of
times without any eye damage or skin irritation? And, of course, the angry
spirit leaves going after the movie's two lovebirds to the end so that they can
save each other and live happily ever after, with the Final Gal probably always
awakening, post-coitial, still wearing her bra...
But will they
live happily ever after? The final scene of Unrest, in Brazil, in which the two
supposedly victorious survivors suddenly pose a question that, obviously
enough, should be the harbinger of future deaths (either their own or at their possibly
former school) is less effective at offering a final shock than it does make
you want to throw your beer at the TV screen. They had to go all the way to
Brazil to suddenly consider that question? How did they ever graduate high
school, much less make it to college?
Unrest does get
some brownie points for fulfilling its exploitive naked-skin quotient by
amalgamating the sight of naked breasts only in conjunction with gross-looking
naked dead bodies, and the events surrounding the unlikable student Rick (Jay
Jablonski) do offer some nice dread, shock and horror, but on the whole the
movie remains an uninvolving, slow-moving, dull, and not very scary
"horror" flick. Absolutely nothing special here — although, in view
of its various awards, it does offer good evidence that some film juries are
obviously rigged. (For a much better angry, killer ghost offing medical workers
— instead of just students — check out the obscure German horror flick Sovia:
Death Hospital from 2007 [trailer];
atmospheric, well-made and brimming with fatal dread, it make Unrest look even
more like the worthless slice of wasted celluloid it is.)
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