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'Grim Reaper'
(Cherish Lee, Brent Fidler, et al / DVD / R / 2007 / LGF)

Overview: Death comes for us all, but after surviving a car crash that should have taken her life, Rachel Wilson finds herself stalked by the Grim Reaper himself intending on taking a soul he feels he is owed. Barely conscious in the ER room, Rachel struggles to convince the nurses that Death is coming for her and that her life is hanging in the balance. Supposedly, for her own protection, Rachel is locked up in a secure mental health facility. But it's not long before she discovers that her incarceration in the old hospital was no coincidence, surrounded by six other "patients" who, themselves, have cheated death. Over the course of the night they will have to face their worst fears, their own mortality, and Death himself.

DVD Verdict: 'Grim Reaper' starts off so puzzlingly that it takes a good fifteen to twenty minutes to figure out just what exactly is going on in the movie! While sometimes it's effective to keep the audience guessing (this is certainly a tried and true method when it comes to creating suspense) here the filmmakers just confuse us, denying us much of a pay off. Quite honestly, it's a chore to sit through this opening third of the film and once we pass that mark and the film starts making a little more sense, it's even more of a chore to actually care. While some interesting symbolism is worked into the movie here and there (Rachel dances in a white 'sexy angel' outfit in an underground club that may or may not represent Hell), any mood that is created is quickly shot to pieces by some uniformly bad acting all the way across the board (to Cherish Lee's credit, she does have moments where she shines but the dialogue is painfully bad, and as such it's hard to buy her character).

Adding insult to injury is the Grim Reaper character himself. You'd think that, seeing as he's the living embodiment of death itself, he would be scary. Instead, he kind of shambles around making low end, guttural noises and pops up to knock someone off with his scythe now and then – the problem is, he's so slow and so lumbering that you can't imagine anyone under the age of seventy years having any difficulty getting away from him. The Grim Reaper in this movie is about as frightening as The Grim Reaper in The Family Guy, and almost as obnoxious. Unfortunately, he's not nearly as funny.

Grim Reaper does have some nice cinematography and it plays around with a few interesting ideas. The director might have been influenced by Jacob's Ladder or even Jean Rollin's Night Of The Hunted as the three films share the same kind of 'weird hospital' setting and play with the central characters conceptions quite a bit. Sadly it doesn't capture the atmosphere or satisfactory conclusions that those two far more interesting pictures had working in their favor. Instead, the ending here feels tacked on and forced, and it makes a bad film even worse. This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.85:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs and comes with the Special Features of:

English Closed Captions
English and Spanish Subtitles
Trailers

www.lgf.com





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