Fall Down Dead (2007)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
Silly horror film about a young woman (Dominique Swain) who witnesses The Picasso Killer (Udo Kier) who has been stalking the city. She's able to get away and call police but there's a rolling blackout sweeping the city so she must stay inside a locked building with a group of other people and of course the killer gets in trying to get rid of them all. FALL DOWN DEAD is yet another in a seemingly endless string of slasher pictures where you get the feeling of deja vu from start to finish. I will say that director Jon Keeyes manages to make the film look very professional and I thought he handled the opening sequence quite well but when you're dealing with a routine screenplay that gives you everything you'd expect and in the order that you'd expect it, there's really nothing anyone could do. The screenplay pretty much goes from A to Z just like you'd expect it to. You know who's going to live. You know who's going to die. You know various twists that's going to happen in the story. You know pretty much everything including how a victim is going to escape the killer and reach her car only to have it not start. It's really too bad that the screenplay goes for the routine and cliché moments from start to finish because I think a rewrite could have made for a better result. Another problem is the story itself, which never really makes too much sense. The police inside this building want to protect the Swain character because she can identify the killer. However, instead of leaving the building and taking her somewhere they decide to just wait around inside the building with the killer instead of leaving and getting her to safety. The excuse given is that the cops want to call a police squad in but after the first two or three people get slaughtered it looks like they'd just leave. Another annoying thing is various scenes that just make you want to jump through the screen and punch the characters. Everyone is fighting for their lives yet it seems each one of them has time to stop what they're doing, talk about marriage, their past and their plans for the future. These moments are just so annoying that you really wonder why no one in the production stood up and asked what was going on. Performances are decent at best with Swain certainly doing the best work here. Kier is also effective in his part as that great voice does wonders. David Carradine appears in one of his many 15-minute cameos that he got after KILL BILL. Even he is featured in a rather stupid sequence where Swain in banging on the office door and screaming for her life. They have her playing terror, the music is that pure thriller mode and yet they have Carradine playing the scene for laughs. It just doesn't add up but then again not much does in this film.
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