Title, promising. Cover image, intriguing. Plot synopsis, very, very alluring. Then you watch it. And your interest fades. And you realize, that you are in the presence of a filmmaker who's not only immature, but is wholly void of confidence in his abilities.
Visions of Suffering is a two-hour music video, but the music is bad. High School student film bad. Its attempts at creating an atmospheric and ominous score are thwarted by the stock sound effects, repetitive queues and really bad Gothic rock. Recently there was a movie made by members of the band Lordi, and in an interview done for Rue Morgue, it was said that "There have been so many examples of how not to do it, if you have a scene with monsters or any villain, if you want to ruin the mood completely, just put (on) some heavy metal." And while I don't particularly care for Lordi's music anyway, the message is more true than I can vouch for.
Sometimes its the juxtaposition of sound and image that creates a great mood, or scene. In the case of VOS, the image hardly stays focused for more than one minute, with a radical jump cut happening every 1-15 seconds, in a ploy to create within the viewer a sense of disjointed nightmare reality. And over these fast choppy images is... fast choppy techno/soundscapes. In the end, all it creates is annoyance.
When you realize the special effects in the movie are amateur at best, you start to think that the jump cutting is an attempt at hiding their poor sfx. But even if you appreciate the sfx, you still have to consider the pointless camera angles, the cheesy color manipulation, the repeated shots of meaningless actions, and bad bad lighting.
It is not good enough to film something "scary" and present it to the viewer and say "isn't this scary?" I can show you a creepy picture of my grandmother eating mincemeat pie and say that, and sure enough, you might think it's creepy at best. But to show it to you repeatedly, with no build up, no suspense, and no logic as to why it's scary, you are simply looking at a grandmother eating mincemeat pie. No sleep lost over that horrifying sight.
Then we come to the white elephant of the film. "Dream Logic". Yes there are "visions" of weird things. Weird things shot in a small forest which, apparently, is the only place these weird things exist in these "visions". Yes, there are waking nightmares and "creepy" old people who say cliché things about vampires and dreams. Yes the story is disjointed and chopped up ala punk rock editing style. But let me ask you this... Why did Freud write so much about dreams and make so much sense as he did so if dreams make no sense at all? Why did Jung devote a life to symbols and mystic psychology if the dreaming subconscious mind has no ebb or flow? If dreams and nightmares are really this nonsensical then these men wasted their life.
I am not saying this movie is a disgrace to these men, not at all. I am saying that this film has no excuse for its lack of coherence. Vampires and Demons have their mythologies and Dreams have their subconscious roots. And to make a film about these things and completely ignore all that, is just plain dumb.
With its half baked philosophy on the waking world and the dreaming mind, its embarrassing use of CGI to describe psychedelic experience, its bad acting, and its fear of revealing itself as shallow and uninspired, this movie is one long excursion of "Isn't this scary?"
