Serum

This was Steve Franke's first attempt to make a full feature. It shows that it was clearly a low budget because frankly, the effects are a bit laughable. In fact, they just changed one's face with a bladder.

The acting was a bit wooden too and the overall quality of the reel, on my copy was a bit blurry, looked like a VHS copy. Maybe that was the intention to create a eighties look. Of course the director teased use in the first minutes with a voluptuous naked chick laying in the sun and when the stepmother came into the picture she was loaded too but tits doesn't make a flick. After that part the flick turns into a lot of blah blah. It's until the end that the brain eating guy appears.

No gore or too much red stuff was used. It's just a cheesy flick with not that much to offer.

Gore 1/5 Nudity 1/5 Effects 2/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

Oh. My. God. This is by far the worst movie I have ever seen. And I mean EVER. (For reference, I have seen: "In Memorium", whose writer and editing was so bad that the title itself is a massive typo; Lifetime Movie Network's "The Unquiet;" "Death of a Ghost Hunter," which I considered to be the worst movie in the universe before I witnessed THIS crime against film; "Hell's Highway", by which I mean Jeff Leroy's 2001 atrocity, not the 1932 classic with Richard Dix; "Psycho Ward," another misspelled disaster; and both "Tomie" and "Uzumaki," which were made all the more abysmal by the fact that their names and concepts were attached to works by Japanese horror maestro Junji Ito. I have also seen segments of "Hard Rock Zombies", the Sci Fi channel's "Piranha" entries, and I just finished "The House By the Cemetery" and "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave".) Like "Uzumaki" and "Tomie," a huge part of the reason this movie sucked so very badly was the massive letdown of the movie itself compared to the movie that was advertised. The synopsis on the jacket is promising. I wasn't expecting miracles, but I figured that the plot would make up for whatever failures of acting or direction might present themselves. Boy was I wrong.

The acting isn't just bad, it's atrocious. If you were to select a random group of 10-year-olds and give them the script, the performance you would get would be more energetic and believable than what this movie subjects its audience to. The costumes are all wrong--the corporate executive that is supposed to be pressuring the doctor to push on with his experiments regardless of the risks is wearing a polo shirt and khakis on the helicopter pad as he circles the doc, half-mumbling badly written bully lines. The performances of the female cast are only marginally better than the male, and unlike most bad horror where the women at least give the impression that on some level they are TRYING to be that god-awful, the performances here are so flat that it doesn't appear they are trying anything at all.

The worst part about the movie, however, is that it becomes apparent after the first fifteen minutes that the two main characters are supposed to be about twenty years younger than the actors portraying them. When they go home for a family dinner the "boys'" father looks about 3 years older than they are. One gets the impression that they are friends or relatives of the people on the production staff who never had a day of acting class in their lives but thought it would be cool to appear in a movie. Given that, I can't even complain about the flat climax and lame ending.

In short, even if bad is your thing, skip this one. My friend, who is a connoisseur of horrid horror, was begging me to turn it off after less than half an hour. It's just that awful.

I love movies but am not a big fan of horror films. However, many of my students love them and tell me I should see this one or that one, which I do from time to time. I watched "Serum" and was greatly surprised. Naturally, there was the gore and violence that I do not normally like, but the film also had a story, which was refreshing. The filmmaker created an interesting plot and took the time to develop the characters, which made you more invested in them. Obviously, it was a small budget film, but it didn't matter because you liked the characters and wanted to find out what was going to happen next. And, I thought the production value was better than many other independent movies I've seen.

"Serum" starts out with credits that are quite reminiscent of the "Re-animator" movies, and it owes a lot to them. The story is very similar; a mad doctor develops a serum that he believes will alleviate pain, sickness and death, but he's apparently not a big believer in clinical trials and so winds up with a brain-eating zombie on his hands in the person of his nephew. The zombie even looks like one of those from "Re-animator," and in fact some of the make-up effects in "Serum" aren't bad. Unfortunately, the script is pretty slow and unbelievable in quite a few places, resulting in a soap opera feel for most of the first 3/4 of the movie. For some reason, the director feels compelled to tell us the time of day every few minutes by flashing it in big white letters across the screen. I can't see why this was important, other than being an attempt to provide viewers with a sense of time passing; sometimes, that wouldn't be present otherwise as the plot plods along.

There are a number of moments that just don't add up here. For instance, one victim is bludgeoned with a sledge hammer, but when we see the victim's head up close, there's no sign of that trauma. In another scene, a character runs down a fully lit hospital corridor (we can see the circles of light on the floor, in fact) with a flashlight in hand, looking for all the world like he's walking in the dark... but a moment later a second character walks down the same fully-lit corridor without one. These are just a couple of examples; moments of what look like directorial or editorial sloppiness crop up quite frequently throughout the movie.

"Serum" is better in some ways than much of what goes straight-to-video as independent horror lately. In terms of technical items — sound and photography, for example — it's got a more polished look than a lot of what lands on a DVD. On the other hand, there's still a good deal of wooden acting (particularly by one of the lead characters, the mad scientist himself!) and nonsensical moments that have nothing to do with suspension of disbelief and everything to do with writing and continuity. Maybe these are things that the people involved with making this film will eventually get more experience with, though. One of the problems with low-budget independent horror lately is that the filmmakers often set out to remake more popular movies that had bigger budgets, and that almost never works out. It didn't in the case of "Serum," anyhow.

I liked this movie. It was fun to watch but it wasn't something you take too seriously. Basically you had two guys who like to party and spy on a topless sunbather, a crazy doctor who performs creepy experiments on corpses with his drug-addicted assistant, a hooker (who isn't hired for what you might think) and a monster who eats peoples brains! What more do you need! It was a bit corny and over the top but that's what I liked about it. A low budget horror movie for sure, but I thought it looked and sounded good. The dialogue was funny and it had some great action scenes. Bottom line – even if it was a low budget film - it was entertaining.