Director: Laura Keets
Year: 1992
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
After her father’s funeral, a grieving woman is gifted a special crystal energy force from a mysterious stranger as a way to help her come to terms with everything, but when she finds they’ve summoned a demonic figure through the crystal must find a way to stop it before it targets her friends.
Review:
This was a pretty disappointing if still somewhat watchable genre effort. Among the better elements of this one comes from the highly intriguing setup that allows for a multitude of storylines to come from. With a decent enough starting point involving the funeral literally opening the film and then meeting up with the stranger shortly afterward that lets her fall into the path of the mystical by turning to crystal healing as a means of overcoming the grief following the death, this gets things going on a fine note. Looking to prey on the weak and vulnerable in such a situation by tricking them into the Satanic objects that will soon start targeting and tormenting them leading into her trying to figure out what the connection is between the series of erotic dreams she has and the bizarre figure stalking her and her friends carries a solid enough idea for a film like this, not being original or clever but serviceable for what it’s trying to do.
That brings about some overall intriguing and somewhat silly encounters involving the creature coming into play. The main idea involving her seeing the creature appear to her in sensual and erotic dreams usually featuring her succumbing to the demonic being sets this in a fine erotically-charged atmosphere before the doomed seance that starts everything. By bringing the creature to life in that manner after this series of dreams, this one gets quite a fun slew of cheesy setups following the summoning, with the creature appearing to them in everyday objects, in front of their faces for flash hallucinations, or even in the water of a toilet bowl, so everything comes together in a goofy way. The finale, featuring a somewhat silly in concept theory to stop it from continuing its rampage, still manages to feature quite a lot of action of the creature running around looking to knock off the remaining members of her friend group in cheesy, gory deaths before going for a mystical route to finally stop it which has some fun ideas at play. With some decent nudity strewn about here as well, this one has a lot to like about it.
There are some big factors holding this down. The main issue here is an incredibly sloppy and sluggish tempo that never comes off remotely interesting in the slightest. While going through the various setpieces talking about the death holding it over the family, the numerous get-togethers that take place with their friends to help her get over everything that happened, and the pacing as a whole just never gets any kind of interesting momentum as a result. These endless scenes waiting around with the group performing these rather lame situations are just repeated too often to be of much importance, and when completed with the absolutely obvious low-budget limitations here make this quite underwhelming. The utterly underwhelming production style, complete with the fuzzy visuals, lack of production value, and the general unappealing style, all highlight how low-budget this whole thing is and are what overall bring this one down.
Overview: **.5/5
Watchable enough for what it is, yet beset with plenty of issues, this one manages to get quite enjoyable. This one doesn’t have a lot of issues, but they are problematic enough to lower this overall. Give it a shot if you’re a fan of this kind of cheesy genre fare or are fine with the issues present, while most others out there should heed caution.
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