Grave Danger (2009)

This is the 2nd film from Yellow Ape Productions and director Jim Haggerty.  This time around they try their hand at making an anthology of 3 short stories with a wrap around to tie them together.  The movie opens with a woman returning home and getting a creepy phone call from a man that claims he can see her.  Keeping her on the phone he tells her the first of the 3 stories.

In the 1st story we see a man that is being terrorized by a creepy guy in a tuxedo.  The man in the tuxedo keeps following him around claiming that he is going to kill him and all of his friends.  Is the tuxedo wearing man all in his head or is he real?  I really couldn’t care less because I found this part of the movie to be terribly boring.  The story didn’t interest me at all and in spite of it being the shortest of the stories it feels like the longest.  The acting here is rough and there is a bit with the camera spinning around a group of people talking that made me sick to my stomach and annoyed the heck out of me. 

After telling her the 1st story the man insists that the woman, Becky, tell him a scary story.  She proceeds to launch into the telling of the 2nd story.  Here a housewife, Carol, is verbally abused by her domineering ass of a husband (played by Vic Martino) and made to feel like garbage.  When he sends her out to buy a gift for the wife of an important client she brings home this African looking idol.  The idol has a strange effect on Carol and turns her from a mousy housewife into a murdering vixen that takes out neighbors, the mailman, and a plumber before she is finished!  This story starts off slow but ends up much stronger than the first one.  There is a good bit of nudity and suggestive dialogue, which is silly and sleazy.  The kills are goofy looking and the dismemberment is even more so.  But this works with overall vibe and feel of the story and adds to the fun.  Now even though it is much better than the 1st story this one also suffers from some pacing issues.  The early scenes with Martino’s character yelling at her go on far too long and feel awkward (which was a bummer because I really dig Martino from Haggerty’s other movie Witchmaster General).  But other than that I really have no complaints.

Director Haggerty definitely saves the best for last.  The 3rd and final story involves a kindly old man and his dummy.  Due to his wife’s illness a ventriloquist named Abe comes out of retirement to earn some money to pay for her medicine.  But when Abe and his dummy, Phineas, are abused by some rowdy party guests things take a strange turn. Yeah guys this is a killer doll movie!  This is by far the cheesiest of the shorts and easily my favorite.  The characters are over the top and the acting less then stellar.  But then again you have a killer doll running around dropping some funny one-liners and killing people.  So who cares about the acting or story?  All that matters is that Phineas is a badass little puppet that gets to kill the annoying humans on screen. 

After the 3rd story ends the wrap around story is resolved in a goofy way that I was kind of disappointed with.  It was kind of a let down after the fun that was the 3rd story.  Taken as a whole Grave Danger is a very ambitious independent movie that is uneven.  Maybe it is just my personal taste, but I think that the movie is at it’s best when it is just trying to be goofy fun.  Hell you have a killer doll and a cursed idol turning a housewife into a killing machine that spouts off dialogue from a bad porno movie!  Do I recommend this movie?  Truthfully if all you did was skip ahead and watch the last story it would be worth every bit of the purchase price, so yeah I think that Grave Danger is worth checking out.  Head over to www.yellowape.net for more information on where to pick this one up.   

2 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2009 John Shatzer