The low-budget production had the premise (innovative and creepy), but the execution of it seemed a little off when it had to count. I wouldn’t call it just a horror film, as it had a bit of everything in it. For old-school Hollywood film-buffs it was ripe with numerous knowing film references (inter-cutting snippets of features), where our smugly weedy protagonist (a multi-layered, skin-crawling performance by Dennis Christopher) begins to confuse fictional with reality after everything in his life begins to crumble as his realises there’s only one way to escape it. He begins role-playing characters and scenes with nothing but conviction. While these sequences were creative, it just seems to take away from the underlining horror.

The dark humour seems to fit, but the script is sorely underwritten due to some stringy sub-plots (mainly that of Thomason’s character) that are poorly thought out. Not that they couldn’t added anything, but they could’ve if a little more exposition was spent on them. Instead they feel trivial. The backdrop is interestingly displayed with the director Vernon Zimmerman using genuine locations where it cooked up some gritty atmospherics. Some moments were kind of overdone (when the unstable homicidal nature and identity crises kicks in, when the torment gets out of hand), but it keeps you highly involved. I didn’t find it particularly suspenseful (other than the climax), but the way it’s organised shows enough drive and originality.

Other than Christopher, the rest of the cast (featuring the likes of Norman Burton, Tim Thomason, Eve Brent, Morgan Paull, and John Steadman) are mildly okay. A perky Linda Kerridge (the Marilyn Monroe look-alike) has a good screen presence and there’s a small role for Mickey Rourke. Craig Safan’s smoking, uncanny score works a treat