The Road from Erebus (2000) Reviews

• Wretched

  erik_the_red_782003-11-13

  I'm sorry, but even for a low-budget independent film, this is a completely abysmal waste of film-making and the audience's time. The acting is *dismal* to the point of being comical, and the directing is a third-rate, inept attempt to knock-off established, 'conventional' direction methods. The lead actors and actress are utterly unconvincing, reprehensibly incapable of portraying even the shallow, predictable roles written for them, and NO aspect of the film even attempts to compensate for this crippling deficiency. The lead role of a schizophrenic with 3-4 (more???) personalities was so unconvincing that I couldn't even attribute ONE personality to her. And her romantic lead's forced, strained, and horribly contrived attempts to portray emotion via various eyebrow gesticulations, was nothing short of high comedy. Even though I saw this on a two-dimensional television screen, several of the 'major' performances were *so* ... anti-inspired ("uninspired" just isn't strong enough a term) that I was hard-pressed to even find more than one dimension in their portrayals. The script might have held some merit in its conceptual stage, but the execution was so despicably shy of even a modest mark, that I really couldn't assess whether the screenwriter was as inept as the director and actors. This movie did make me appreciate the fact that on even a bad movie, there are scores of crew doing as good a job in their roles as can be asked for, yet the overall film is so weak that everyone associated with it is tainted. Could the editor have fixed this carnage? No, but the film is so patently horrible that we'll never even consider that he might have tried his/her best, or that it somehow could have been even worse if he/she had done less. There were no faults in the technical aspects of sound, lighting, and more, but the movie's so wretched that we'll never pause to say, "Nice lighting!" ... I guess that disasters like this are why unions are formed for the innocent crew linked to train-wrecks far beyond their control. :) I will say that there is a modicum of entertainment value here, in witnessing scenes so thoroughly butchered that they are complete caricatures of what they mean to be. The incomprehensibly-excessive, ridiculously unconvincing reactions to the smallest things in this movie are genuinely humorous at times, right down to one of the final scenes, in which the male star arrives at work with black shoe-polish on his cheekbone, yet with immaculate hair and dress, and his co-workers all *try* to react as though he were clearly knocking at Death's door, and he ploddingly, deliberately assures them, "I'm OK. Really. No, I mean. I'm fine." over a chorus of insincere, muffled, "Oh my Lord"s and "Were you in a car wreck?" queries. I realize that inexperienced personalities in the business have to start somewhere, but hopefully efforts as weak as this are ejected before the people involved actually gain any sort of professional or even scholastic acknowledgement that they're entitled to make a film. This should be a high school junior's project with serious production problems, not the result of someone's (or worse, several people's) efforts in the world of professional film-making. That any studio, even a small one, would commit to producing and actually releasing this in anything more than the director's basement, is shocking and depressing to anyone with an appreciation of cinematic arts. View at your own risk, but if you're prepared to waste this 2-hour chunk of your life, I hope you have a sarcastic sense of humor, and perhaps a edge-softening beverage close at hand.

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• Good debut, fine lead performance

  IITBLWDC2003-02-11

  Caught this on tape through a friend. Well worth a look, especially for the lead performance of Brenda Price who traverses four distinct roles with pathos, humor, and aplomb. Kudos to writer/director David Sporn for a good time overall. Keith

• Really enjoyed this

  Horsz22004-08-01

  Finally watched this on TiVo and really liked it. It has some definite signs of a low budget, but I got caught up in it early on and more and more as it went along. The lead actress was great. She had to pull off some pretty heavy duty drama – as 3 different characters! I thought she did a pretty amazing job. I don't know why we haven't seen more of her. The bad guy was really warped, and his twisted relationship with the girl was beautifully demented. I was intrigued from the first scene when the girl runs out of the guys bedroom after a 1-nighter, and the story got more and more twisted and interesting as it went along. Overall, this was fun and creepy with a cool undertone of dark humor. A good time.

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• Cant turn it off

  kearney12002-12-23

  Happened upon this early one morning and was not able to turn it off it keeps you guessing what is going to happen and more often then not your wrong. Trying to figure out what is reality and what is not is not as easy as it seems with these characters, cast and crew did a wonderful job here