Suspended Animation

During the early passages of John Hancock's `Suspended Animation,' you think you've got it figured out: It's `Deliverance' meets `Misery.' But the pleasure in experiencing `Suspended Animation' comes from the way Hancock and his screenwriter, wife Dorothy Tristan, throw you a curveball, taking the film somewhere unexpected. If the first half of `Suspended Animation' reveals the very nature of evil, then the second act is about the obsession with it. Hancock and Tristan show how, for some, closure can't be reached until the evil that fuels relentless nightmares is confronted and dissected. The film stars Alex McArthur as Tom Kempton, a Hollywood animator with a beautiful wife, Hilary (Hancock veteran Rebecca Harrell), a stunning home, but a somewhat stalled career. Needing a vacation, Tom heads to northern Michigan for a snowmobile trip with two buddies, Jack (Dan Riordan) and Cliff (Jeff Puckett), but the excursion takes an unexpected detour when Tom's snowmobile crashes in the forest. Tom stops by a nearby cabin for help, only to fall into a trap set by two deadly serial-killer sisters, Vanessa (Laura Esterman) and Ann (Sage Allen) Boulette. They've killed before and are ready to make Tom their latest victim. Hancock and Tristan take almost fiendish delight in seeing how far they can go to make audiences squirm here, particularly since sharp objects are lying about, along with jars containing parts of the human anatomy no man would like removed. Tom survives the ordeal - after a dynamite snowmobile chase that features not just an ax, but an avalanche - but can't let go of what happened to him. He meets the sisters' brother, Philip (J.E. Freeman), who is doing time in jail, then tracks down the daughter of one of the sisters, Clara (Maria Cina), a waitress and aspiring actress whose son, Sandor (Fred Meyers), may have picked up a few nasty habits from his disturbed relatives. For all its squeamish moments, `Suspended Animation' becomes a fascinating glimpse into depravity and insanity. A bizarre, unsettling dynamic unfolds between the Boulettes, who foster a considerably warped notion of the concept of `family.' That leads to an impressively restrained, surprisingly quiet finale, where Tom witnesses the tragedy of the Boulette family unfold before him, even as his life, and that of his wife, are in danger. McArthur is quite good; `Suspended Animation,' however, belongs to the ladies. Esterman and Allen, as the two sisters, create a dangerous, at times hilariously unstable team. You're never sure when the two might explode, while Esterman, later on, takes Vanessa to another level, revealing a desperation that is sad and pathetic. Cina is a find. Her performance is so natural, so unassuming, it doesn't come across as acting. She's the most sympathetic character, the heart and soul of the film. `Suspended Animation' is one of the creepier films in some time, a superb example of taking a formula story and transforming it into the unexpected. Rating: 3 stars

What struck me was the remarkable similarity of Fred McArthur-who played animator Tom Kempton-to Gene Kelly both in looks and voice. Its a typical film of today's horror genre where everything is thrown in and you get the impression they never knew how to end it. The cannibal theme was quite interesting but rather pointless as we only saw a pair of women who talked about it.Kemton,by this time tied to a wheelchair and pleading to be set free,suddenly found himself minus a finger as one of the mad sisters chopped it off.Later when he was rescued by his snowmmobiling buddies who'd gone ahead of him,the finger was "reattached" with sticking plaster though you had to assume he later went to a hospital. Placing Kempton there in the first place was the stock plot of going to the house for help after he crashed his machine Here though is where the story began to go haywire as the animator makes a film based on the mad sisters-he'd previously promised to put them in the movies if they let him go!! Next up comes a meeting with a woman who turns out to be the adopted daughter of the youngest sister-she agrees to be a model for Kempton's next production.She in turn has a son who gives insanity a bad meaning and hes suspected of being a serial killer when Kempton discovers a pile of rings presumably trophies kept from his victims. Its not really that frightening when you think of what happens in real life but if you watch this movie don't blink too much or you may lose the plot! The ending was the kind thats been used over and over again-the villains are presumably killed but still keep coming back.we have the landrover which gets bogged down in the mud-as a variation to being unable to start-and you think no way would Gene Kelly have played in a film like this-he would probably have found it difficult keeping up with the plot!

For a video nasty this was surprisingly watchable. The choice to examine the obsession with evil in the 2nd act of the film gave it a depth that few horror/thrillers in the low budget genre ever truly achieve.

The basic plot is that a movie director is drugged and kidnapped by a pair of crazy cannibalistic sisters while he is on a snowmobiling holiday. Although he escapes, his brush with this evil leaves him obsessing with understanding what would make these women, particularly the dominant sister, Vanessa, become so twisted and warped.

His investigation leads him to find Vanessa's daughter, Clara, a struggling actress with an abusive teenage son.

The film doesn't revert to pointless gore but instead gives a thoughtful exploration of the quality of evil, beautifully examining the seeds of a serial killer and examining the idea of nature or nurture motivations. For the discerning viewer who doesn't just want a basic horror shocker, this film delivers some interesting ideas despite a few production and script flaws which can be attributed to small budget rather than small talents.

I could not sleep so I turned on the TV and this seemed to be the only movie that got my attention, at first, it seems that the movie will end after few torture scenes or what so ever but there are huge twists in the history that makes this film remarkably good besides not having an unique history it does make itself unique.

There are some actual stuff related to cannibalism such as it being heriditary and other sick stuff, the movie explores some bit of it but I didn't like so much how they introduced and put the history together, there seemed to lack an excuse to the main character be there and doing what he was actually doing.

Despite it's bad reviews, it's a worthy and interesting movie to watch and it develops very well along the theme.

Tom is a Hollywood animator who heads out on a snow trip with some pals. Where he crashes his snowmobile and seeks refuge from two sisters, who just happen to be cannibals. But before he becomes dinner, his pals find him and rescue from this horror; but the police only find one of the bodies. 3 months later, Tom plans to make an animated feature about his experience and he learns that the police have discovered the body of the missing sister. But this ordeal has hit him so hard that now he's truly obsessed about the sister that he learns that she had a daughter who she gave up. Which she just happens to be an aspiring actress. So through work-related meetings he becomes good friends with her. He gladly finds out she has no idea about her real mother and his horrific incident, although he realises her teenage son has inherited his grandmother's evil frame of mind.

Oh, what torture! Well, some scenes and dialogues were excruciating, but actually, I didn't think the flick was too bad, but again it was far from good. The fundamental problem was that it's overlong and there's just too much on the plate to congest. I found this independent flick an intriguing attempt in the thriller foray and there's some skill behind the camera, but the unbalanced material isn't a particularly successful mix. After what I thought was an okay opening 40-minutes that simply revisits "Misery" with its icy and isolated backdrop and a pair of kooky cannibalistic sisters, it just loses steam. The mid-section is very stodgy - by virtually becoming more of a character study involving the survivor Tom becoming infatuated by this whole ordeal and wanting to make something out of it by getting involved in one 'insane' family. It's one really strange fixation! But during this chewy period I found the story's progression rather colourless and the continuity lacking. So many details that are brought up are left unexplained or simply pushed aside. While, the dry dialogues really do stretch creditability and sometimes ramble on pointlessly. Although, a little of the sardonic humour helps a bit. The over-exaggerated climax isn't remotely surprising, but the constant use of three different endings was just too contrived. Every time I thought it was finished, something else was tacked onto the following scene.

Now the performances would fit right into a soap opera… say like "Passions". Pretty scratchy and at times rather hokey was the acting. Alex McArthur gives an understated performance, but Maria Cina as the daughter Clara Hansen is surprisingly good. Fred Meyers as the teenage brat Sandor Hansen is simply laughable with his angst and blimey; he has one real nasty habit. Angelo Badalamenti's score is extremely harrowing by playing around with many sequences and it gives the film a touch of elegance. The direction by John D. Hancock I could give the cold shoulder, but I thought he done an adequate job with what he had to work with. He staged one or two suspenseful and minor grisly scenes, despite most of it be telegraphed. But more often you could say I found it hard going and terribly cliché-ridden to be entirely effective entertainment.

"Suspended Animation" takes on a systematic pattern that has a decent looking production, but the material is pretty much a scramble and saps most of the suspense right out of it.