Red Mist (a.k.a. Freakdog - actually a much more appropriate title, you'll find out) is an indie horror flick from the guy that brought us 'Shrooms'. It's another one of those 'medical students do really stupid things that could easily muck up their future' movies, and some of what you'll see just reeks of several other similar-themed movies.
Catherine (Arielle Kebbel, who could easily pass for Mandy Moore's sister) is a med student with a bunch of drunken, horny, and ridiculously un-focused fellow med-student friends who are terrribly clichéd. You have your typical blonde rich-bitch (whom you love to hate), the ordinary girl (who, if I'm being honest, has one of the best deaths), the goth girl (channeling her inner Keira Knightly - accent and all), the dorky yet married dude (himself doing his best Seth Rogen impression), the boyfriend type (but still not the so-called McDreamy -and sooooo not the George Clooney/Doug Ross type), and the obligatory smart ass guy who starts all the trouble (I couldn't wait for that blockhead to bite it)...
Catherine has a stalker of sorts. Kenneth, a rather sad yet disturbed young man who enjoys hanging out in the morgue and taking pictures of dead girl's breasts with his cell phone while he cuts himself. Nice.
Kenny shows up at a bar where the aforementioned friends are closing it down getting drunk and taking some drugs they stole from the hospital pharmacy (off to a great start in their medical careers, eh?) Kenny asks if he can walk Catherine home, she politely declines, and so Kenny shows them some pictures on his phone that show them stealing the pharmacy drugs.
I guess he thought he'd try a bit of blackmail to get into Cat's pants, I don't know.
He leaves, but the gang has Catherine convince him to come back and 'party with them'.... They, in turn, make Kenny down (quickly through a funnel, no less) a lethal concoction of alcohol and drugs, then carelessly but unintentionally induce a seizure while using strobe lights with music. Nice. Kenny drops to the floor, unresponsive.
Whilst discussing their options (shades of 'I Know What You Did Last Summer') they wait too long and our boy Kenneth slips into a coma. Then they do the only thing they can do (because this is a movie, after all, and needs to be at least 90 minutes long - gotta do something!) - they dump him off at the hospital, hoping someone finds him.
Of course this throws a major guilt trip on Cat. Everyone else, including her apparent boyfriend, seems to think this is a lucky break. Yay! He's in a coma and can't tell the cops what happened.
Catherine reads up on some experimental drugs that can possibly help coma patients, so in keeping in tune with the 'really f**king stupid things med students do' theme, she forges a doc's name on a prescription and gets said drugs for her 'pal' Kenny. (Would someone explain to me why they would even have these experimental drugs on stock at the hospital pharm? This baffles me.)....
So anyway, she injects Kenny with the drug (because no one at all is in the coma ward late at night - except one floozy nurse who has a penchant for leaving her post and getting her rocks off with a random doctor in the supply closet...) and low and behold, he develops some brain function. Imagine that.
However, unbeknownst to Catherine, the drug apparently makes the brain have 'out of body experiences'... meaning Kenny is somehow able to possess other people, who in turn exact his revenge on the unsuspecting med students who have left him in this deplorable condition.
Seriously.
I didn't dislike this movie, but it left some room for improvement. There were a few sequences near the end that just weren't fluent, and I was left wondering just what had happened. At times, it morphed into 'Shrooms' land for me... with some weird psychedelic images and the unavoidable 'girl running half naked through the woods' experience. I mean, what was she doing out in the woods when this whole film is basically set in a hospital? It left a small bit of continuity fly right out the window.
Red Mist isn't scary, either.
It's more of a psychological morality play with enough gore to place it in the horror category, but the gruesome kills don't even show up till like, 45 minutes into the film.
It's not the type of movie you'd want to pay ten bucks to see at the theater (but what is?) but it would do for a saturday afternoon if you can catch it on the Sci-Fi channel. I mean, it's better than one of those Lifetime movie of the week crap-fests!
After you see it though, you'll realize, like I did - that Freak Dog would have been a much better title. Red Mist sounds like something that is on stage at the Miss America pageant. Ugh.
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