Trance

Trance (2010) - I've gotta say, in the horror movies I watch where females wreak havoc on males, I'm rooting for the girls 99 percent of the time.

This one falls in the one percent category.

To be fair, most of the females who turn into glowing-eyed demons and kill the guys are actually innocent victims after taking a drug given to them by Dominique Swain.

In fact, basically everybody in this 2010 film is a victim, except for Swain. The big mystery that kept me around for an hour and 23 minutes was, why was she doing it? The answer, I'm afraid, is pretty stupid, but that's how it goes in many low-budget horror movies. Whatever. It was fine.

The gist is this: Swain plays a young woman named Laura, who recruits other young women to attend a special rave party. She offers special passes to a group of chicks looking to have a good time. One of them just had her boyfriend cheat on her, and her friends are trying to pull her out of her funk.

While they're in her limo, Laura convinces them to try a new and exciting drug that she guarantees will take them on quite a trip. And oh boy, does it ever.

The weird thing about this drug is that while it turns females into killer demons, it has very little effect on males. If nothing else, it weakens them. That makes them prime prey at the rave. To say the least, the carnage that ensues is very one-sided.

I'm not surprised at the low ratings here. It didn't exactly knock my socks off, either. But action-wise, it wasn't lacking. In the blood category, it might go over well with gorehounds. There are some sleaze moments, too, so that crowd might get something out of it. In the end it's ehhhh... OK.

Dominique Swain has a filmography that's absolutely huge, but I don't think I've seen her in anything else. Here, I didn't find her smug facial expressions and mannerisms appealing at all. I might give her another look in Rottentail when we get close to Easter.

Grade: 5 out of 10 stars.

Sometimes we stumble onto a movie with a premise that alone is enough to invite us to watch, regardless of whether or not it's any good. There's no missing the apparent low regard for this, but I've watched plenty of movies that met the same fate only to think they were fantastic. I can't say I didn't have any reservations as I started to watch, but after all, why not? Well, I'll tell you why not: for whatever promise the idea may have had, 'Trance' is in no way made well, and is frankly altogether excruciating.

There are, actually, some good ideas in the writing. There are some names and faces in the cast that we've seen before, and we know that they're capable. The blood and gore actually look pretty good. Unfortunately, this is the full extent of praise I can offer, because everything else about this is roundly awful. The number one word I would use to describe this, in 100-foot tall neon letters, is INAUTHENTIC. Nothing here comes off as believable or real, let alone entertaining, and whether for lack of skill or lack of effort the whole affair is atrocious. Dialogue, scene writing, characters, direction, the production design - and, emphatically, the acting - are at once both terribly overcooked and completely floundering and wanting. Pacing is stilted and achingly sluggish, the regular use of freeze-frame editing and title cards is boorish, and the very execution of every last shot and scene feels hopelessly amateurish. The music is a weak imitation of EDM, never varying even when the horror element finally starts to show up, and every attempt at humor falls flatter than the flattest sheet of paper.

All this is made still worse by cinematography and production values that barely exceed the levels of "home video." Allow me to provide a frame of reference: think of those scenes in commercials, film, TV, or Internet sketch comedy in which characters are drunk, partying, having a great time and are surrounded by other people who are having fun, then the perspective changes and we see they're actually mumbling, stumbling, slovenly, drooling and urinating on themselves, barely able to stand on their own two feet. The entirety of 'Trance' comes off with that same distinct dichotomy of perception (what the movie pretends to be) versus reality (agonizingly poor, fumbling, and clumsy). The "rave" scenes in the first half of the movie a prime example of this, and meanwhile, of course the would-be "heroes" are two wretchedly wooden, stocky, gung-ho, hard-boiled, copaganda white dudes.

Only within the last ten (arguably twenty) minutes does it seem like 'Trance' has finally met its low-budget potential, but by then it's far, far too late. One rather wishes that the affected women in the fictional story had enacted such brutal violence in real life to stop the picture from being completed. For the strength of the last stretch in particular, and recognizing what this could have been, I sincerely want to like it more than I do. I regret to say, however, that lack of financial backing is the least of this title's problems, and value is sorely missing in almost every regard. I wish all involved the best of luck, and can only hope and assume they've learned their lessons and improved their craft in the time since, but 'Trance' itself is an ungenuine mess with much too little entertainment to be worth checking out.