Opening Day: 21 February 2008

Synopsis:

Ian Stone (Mike Vogel) is an all-American kid with a great life and a loving and devoted girlfriend, Jenny Walker (Christina Cole). Late one night, while driving home from a painful loss at the ice hockey rink, Ian comes across a bewildering discovery; something that looks like a dead body near the railroad crossing. Investigating the grisly discovery, Ian is attacked by the 'corpse', forced onto the tracks and run over by an oncoming train...

Instead of meeting his maker, Ian wakes up in a suit in an office. He's very much alive and living with a sexy but mysterious woman called Medea (Jaime Murray). Jenny is still around, but she's not his girlfriend, just a co-worker and one of a number of apparently familar faces. Ian soon deduces that he is being hunted. Seemingly living everyone's ultimate nightmare, Ian is destined to repeat this life/death cycle every day until he can make sense of his circumstances before his pursuers succeed in killing him again.

Movie Review:

Walking into The Deaths of Ian Stone, I was expecting a darker version of Groundhog’s Day. The actual reality of the film is that it is just a cheap horror film with an interesting premise that is ruined by clichéd writing, bad ideas, and a complete lack of script. It’s the story of Ian Stone (Mike Vogel) a man who is murdered each day, only to wake up to a new scenario, in which he leads a different life. When he begins his new life each time, he is plagued by the memories of his past. Confused and feeling as though he is going insane he discovers he is being stalked by unnamed assailants and cannot explain why they are targeting him each time.

Cloverfield pretty boy Mike Vogel stars as the troubled titular character, an unfortunate yet dashingly handsome lad who dies a most unusual death every single day, only to be reborn into another life moments later. While the first half of Piana's ambitious project is often engaging and quite good, the second serving is an excellent example of what not to do with your genre hybrid once you've realized your concept has absolutely nowhere to go. The story's conclusion, much to my shrieking dismay, resembles something you might find lurking at the bottom of such generic horror productions as Blood & Chocolate and The Covenant, a destination that no one in their right might should ever plot a course for. Stan Winston's creature design, meanwhile, gets impossibly lost in a dodgy cloud of poorly-executed CGI mist, though I suspect this technique may have been implemented to disguise cheap-looking prosthetics.

"What's the matter? Are you scared?", with those simple words the end titles start to run and the sad thing is, none of us are scared. The matter is that we're bored, well most of us anyway. At a reported budget of $11 million, English horror-fantasy "The Deaths of Ian Stone" is definitely a production-value program lineup in the After Dark Horrorfest. It's got a fairly original concept and diverting visual effects from Oscar-winning f/x maestro Stan Winston, who also produced. But this slick genre piece is less than satisfying in narrative and character terms, with a repetitious, gimmicky structure and murky motivation.

Movie Rating:

(A dissapointing attempt of a potentially good subgenre)

Review by Lokman B S