DVD Review – Needle

10th August 2011

Needle (15)

Dir: John V. Soto

Scr: Anthony Egan and John V. Soto

Starring: Michael Dorman, Travis Fimmel, Trilby Glover, Tahyna Tozzi

90 mins, 2010

Distributor: High Fliers

At first glance I was hoping for some hybrid between Hellraiser and Jumanji. Young teens being chased down roads by leather clad monkeys crying “I have an eternity to explore your flesh”, only to be saved by an elderly hunter dressed as a kinky demon with his blunderbuss. In fact can someone please make this? I will give you gold.

As it stands Needle is actually about an old timey mechanical device called La Vaudo Mort – sounds sexy but it could just be called “the left over prop from Thirteen Ghosts” – which comes into the possession of student Ben. One night after a crazy party of care free imbibing, tongue wars and awkward-only-people-dance-like-that-in-films dancing, the box goes missing. After which Ben’s friends starting perishing in increasingly gruesome and pointless ways. For you see the box has a nice little feature where you can take a photo of someone, a wax doll and some needles and by inserting the pointy things into the doll inflict a horrid end on whoever’s mug is on the photo.

But who is killing Ben’s friends you ask?

I didn’t either, I didn’t care. I could try and do a concise critique of Needle but the underlying fact is that life is simply too short. You can probably gather from that that it’s not very good and you’d be correct. It’s not that Needle is an abysmal piece of spooky claptrap it’s that it’s so mind numbingly dull. All horror/thrillers be they masterpiece or fungus need to allude slightly to being scary or tense. Needle decides it doesn’t have to stick with this tradition. Instead we get something that resembles an episode of The OC mixed in with some violent deaths. Young man misses his dead father, has problems with his girlfriend, has a cop-brother trying to investigate the mysterious deaths. There’s supposed to be some mystery element in there, but you’d find more suspense in an episode of Loose Women.

The acting ranges from the “making the best with what they have” of Travis Fimmel to the standard gurns you expect of a nameless wonder in a z-list “horror”. The script and direction are as hackneyed as your average Danielle Steele movie. It beggars my comprehension that time and effort went into making a film like this. It serves no purpose in it’s chosen genre. Horror fans can find hundreds of similarly plotted films that do it a whole lot better.

It’s too late for me but you can save yourselves, watch not the Needle.

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