Sleep Disorder

This is a notable step up from the first two movies on the disc, for a simple little reason I like to call “effort.” Sure, it’s the incompetent effort of people that need a lot more practice before they make anything that could be called good, but damn it, at least they tried, unlike the fuckers that made Redneck County Fever and Devil’s Moon.

Filmed in flashback, the movie follows a budding young ghost hunter as he kicks the flowers away from a grave while filming a documentary searching for ghosts, and finds himself haunted by the ghost of the woman buried there. Most of the story is being told by him to a psychiatrist, whose sessions with him are curiously filmed in a bit of pseudo-slow motion, where the audio comes in fine but the video is all choppy and awkward. I at first took this to just be an effort to distinguish these scenes as coming at the end of the film or something, until we later get a scene with the psychiatrist by herself with the video trick still going on. I now have no option but to assume that this is done because the psychiatrist is so terminally boring that all laws of physics become warped and time itself seems to slow down around her. There really is no other possible explanation here.

Speaking of video effects, the filmmakers pretty much pull out all the stops here. They use pretty much every effect that one could easily find on Photoshop or some similar home-style computer video editor. What’s more, the camerawork is actually done with some attention to shot composition and some rudimentary knowledge that a good filmmaker films more than just the immediate action in as few shots as possible. It’s not done well, but after seeing several scenes in Redneck County Fever that were all done in one shot for no discernible reason beyond that it would have presumably involved effort to try a different camera angle, I’m happy that some measure of effort was made here. Perhaps tomorrow when I watch The Vulture’s Eye I’ll get effort and talent…no, that’s probably asking too much.

Rating: *