Filmed in scenic Cherry Hill, New Jersey (best known as the stomping grounds of an obese criminal named Sylvan Scolnick), this comes off as a somewhat promising opening for a passable if derivative horror flick. A couple of teenagers are carrying a trunk containing the personal effects of their recently deceased grandfather; unsurprisingly it falls to the ground and pops open, revealing among other items a book whose cover rather blatantly resembles the one in "Evil Dead." In this short's best exchange, one brother asks the other "What did Grandpa do, anyway?" "Didn't Mom tell you?" the other replies, "he was a Satan worshiper." Hmmm, wonder if that was a union gig; was there a dental plan? "Well son, Dad used to say Satan worshipping really went downhill once they started hiring all these illegal immigrants..." That night the younger brother is sitting around with a bunch of his friends doing nothing in particular; inevitably one of them opens the book and looks through it, which (also a la "Evil Dead") seems to invite some invisible force to arrive and do them dirt. The only kid who survives takes the book to school the next day for Show and Tell. Just as one is thinking "Hey, a whole classroom full of kids in mortal danger, this could get interesting," it's over.
If you're wondering if it's worth investing about twenty minutes of your life in it: on the plus side, the special effects aren't bad given the presumably minuscule budget, especially a couple of shots of what looks like black smoke wafting into some light bulbs. The teenagers (for a change) are neither too charming nor too obnoxious nor too erudite nor too horny; really not too interesting, come to think of it. (It would have been fun to seem them playing some monster-based video game before they start getting massacred.) Some shots of spattered blood are very convincing. But having all the violence occur off camera seems a "short cut" used in a short film, whereas in a feature-length offering it would have whetted our appetite for what would be to come. The absence of some kind of valid "payoff" leaves one feeling somewhat had. It's unclear why "Fearnet" felt this warranted inclusion on their movie list. But if the director were to work it into something feature-length and get it rated R, I reckon I'd come back for more....
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