Reviews of films from off the beaten path, written for those who love the cinematic world and want to hear about more than mainstream movie releases.
[Originally published at UnseenFilms]
In a better, perfect world, you’d find copies of Greg Arce’s ultra-low budget horror film DeN while rooting among the shelves of VHS tapes at your local mom and pop video store, tucked between other greats of the shot-on-video horror movement that flourished in the 1980s with the release of VHS recorders. Alas, through a combination of bad timing and legal shenanigans, DeN has tragically been largely lost to time. So while the brainless gorefests of lesser filmmakers and cinematic hobbyists thrive in midnight revival houses and basement videotape collections, DeN languishes in a bootlegger’s oblivion. And that’s a damn shame. For while DeN is a mess, it’s the best kind of mess, one with more ambition, enthusiasm, and sheer passion for movie-making than it does the means to do them justice. The film starts with a serial killer—played by Arce—kidnapping four random people and chaining them in his basement. After they come to, he reveals that he’s collected them to play a little game, namely to provide him with conversation on a number of topics. If they can fascinate him with their responses, he’ll let them live. If they can’t, they’ll end up like one of the severed heads in plastic bags he taunts them with. Over the next eight days, the terrified victims open up about their deepest, darkest secrets and learn that they might not have been so randomly selected after all. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Arce swears that the creators of the 2004 film Saw plagiarized his film, and indeed he might have something of a case: both James Wan and Light Whannell attended a Melbourne film festival in 2002 where the film was warmly received, even winning an award for its lead actress. Both films share an astonishing amount of narrative DNA, both in their characters, their set-ups, and their twists. But regardless, where Saw was a polished studio picture, DeN hums with the can-do spirit of indie auteurism. It’s fascinating to watch Arce work around the technical limitations of single lens VHS recorders by inventing his own visual language emphasizing claustrophobic close-ups and rapid editing. The screenplay needs work—it rambles for nearly two hours when it should’ve been a tight eighty minutes—but what’s there is fascinating enough to make one wish Arce had made more than just this one film.
