Lich

Shot on amateur video equipment, with audio quality akin to your average home movie, Lich is probably not what you might expect (ie, a scary horror). The actors are barely amateur- dramatic standard, and what could laughably be referred to as special effects only harm what little credibility this movie has. The characters are shallow and lacking any emotion - the opening scenes demonstrate that the casting requirements for the female roles boiled down to blonde hair and large breasts.

The story itself, if you can bear to follow it, plods so slowly you may consider fast forwarding most of the way through. But if you can tolerate the bad acting, poor continuity, hammy music and third-rate production values, you may just find some entertainment in Lich's nearly-soft-porn appearance, if you're into that sort of thing. But even then, you'd be disappointed to find there is none.

Not the most original ideas to begin with but sort of an intriguing one. Resident Demon's problems stem outside of its complete lack of originality which really is the least of its problems. The acting is very disengaged with almost everybody sounding bored and not caring less about their characters and what's happening to them, Billy Parish's eyebrows agreed giving the best acting and that's even not in a good way. Samantha Klein is beguiling however and is the bright spot that stops you from shutting the television off completely. In all fairness though they didn't have anything to work with in the first place, to call the characters shallow would be an understatement, none of them are engaging and Resident Demon does absolutely nothing to make them interesting. The script is also horrendous, and that's when you could hear it properly, the delivery is mumbled and said with no heart and the dialogue itself sounds improvised and structurally broken, often not making any sense. The story suffers from some truly tedious pacing, to the extent that if it weren't for Klein you'd be bored to tears, and the suspense and horror elements- when you can recognise them- being done incredibly predictably. Little of it makes much sense either and it is not difficult at all to work out what would happen next, the deaths are cheaply edited and have a complete lack of invention. The music is often over-bearing and somewhat hammy-sounding, a very over-egging the pudding sort of vibe. Visually it's rather amateurish with frenzied, unfocused editing and the murky lighting, at times making things near-incomprehensible. In all honesty likening it to a student film is an insult to student films, Resident Demon looks as though it was made and directed(no character, no style, no nothing) by somebody who never studied film in their lives. In conclusion, bad, very bad, in terms of the script and directing rather wretched. See it for Klein only. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Lich. Supernatural tale about the spirit of a dead witch possessing the living, moving from victim to victim, in her quest for immortality, committing vicious murder along the way. This movie is obviously low budget, very low, and most of the "action" takes place within the confine of a modest sized house, giving it a horrible claustrophobic feeling. Acting isn't great, though I've seen far worse. There's a fair amount of cheap gore, plus lashings of erotica, sadly lacking in nudity. The biggest let down is that it's just so BORING, a real chore to sit through. The witch's victims rise from the dead to do her bidding near the end which is quite entertaining but simply not enough to save this dross.

Firstly the weak plot. Although weak by most movies' standards, this is actually one of the better elements of this film. But believe me, that's not praise. Secondly the terrible acting. This film gives the impression that the director's mates were just rounded up and all given a go. Whilst drunk. This brings us to possibly the worst aspect of this terrible, terrible film - the directing. I have to say here that when I say 'directing' I am in no way comparing this to the works of Hitchcock, Spielberg or in fact any film which has been 'directed'. This film is shot to make it seem like a very bad, low budget school project. In fact the entire film gives off a 'this was made by a bunch of ten-year-olds' vibe. Quite difficult to achieve I am sure, but no reason to waste even a ten minute trip to the video store. How this has not been voted the worst movie of all time I'm not quite sure. Maybe its because not enough people have seen it. To all you who haven't, you are the lucky ones.

This movie has extremely poor video quality. It was obviously shot on video, but has a very muddy and soft focus look throughout the movie. The angles were uninventive and the general feel of the movie is mediocre. There are insipid colored filters on some of the interior lighting that just makes the details of the image that much harder to see. Bad lighting and bad audio are just a few of the problems with this 'movie'.

LICH or RESIDENT DEMON as it is called on video, deals with an 'entity' that moves from person to person via touch. Supposedly a witch (a hot looking one, go figure) died in a house and somehow cursed it. We get a group of people having a get together in the house when people start dying one by one.

One good thing, the young actresses in this film are quite beautiful, BUT .... When we are teased with the possibility of seeing some beautiful (but inexperienced) 'actresses' showing some skin, we get nothing. Okay, a bunch of nudity would have helped the bad story, AND good gore effects and violent kills would have helped as well. Oh well, we're out of luck. There are some okay gore effects but the directing (or lack there of) eliminates any horror, dread, shock or emotion at all in any of these scenes.

A tremendous disappointment ... and the recent DVD cover has new cover art that implies some sort of 'RINGU' like creature prowling the hallways, but this is a sham. There is no such creature. Only inexperienced actors running around and ending up bloody. Avoid at all costs.