EVEN in April, when the film industry uses our brains to scrape the filth from its boots, it's rare to come across a picture quite so atrocious as this mind-boggling horror comedy. At the screening I attended, hardened veterans were poking themselves in the eyes with sharp pencils to confirm they hadn't fallen asleep and drifted into a land of scare-free nightmares.
Largely filmed, it seems, in one of Wicklow's smaller broom cupboards, Kit Ryan's film finds Stephen Dorff, a hoodlum with no sense of humour, encountering the reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible in a Moscow office building. While the hairy Grand Prince pursues the hero up and down stairs, Bronagh Gallagher fumes as a religious maniac and Hugh O'Conor simpers as (yet again) a nerd in a cardigan.
So uncertain is the collision between horror and comedy, so shoddy are the special effects, so bizarre are the actors' attempts at Russian accents, that I actually found myself wondering how a star of Stephen Dorff's magnitude got inveigled into such a project. Surely he can still get work demonstrating knives at trade fairs or dressing up as Barney the Dinosaur for department stores.
The film-makers, who somehow found the cash to shoot a few exteriors in exotic locales, would undoubtedly argue that the movie is deliberately aiming for the class of horror kitsch perfected by such low-budget production companies as Troma Entertainment.
That's fair enough. But the funniest scenes come during the moments of supposed high tension and those sections that deliberately aim for comedy could only be less hilarious if they featured Matthew McConaughey (see elsewhere). Does straight-to-DVD mean nothing to these people?
