(This review originally appeared online at Bumscorner.com in 2007. WARNING: Contains spoilers.)
Well, there's this circle of life, you see, and sometimes when you're about to die, the circle doesn't close properly and you pop out of it, or something, and you cheat death. Which makes the GRIM REAPER (2007) hopping mad since he doesn't get to cram his big, sharp scythe through your midsection. So he comes after you like Jason or Freddy Krueger, except they looked sorta cool and he's just a tall, uninspired bit player who looks like a half-wrapped mummy schlepping around in a hokey hooded cloak, which sucks since you'd think the freakin' Grim Reaper, of all people, would be the undisputed King Of The Scary Dudes.
Anyway, there's this fairly cute blonde stripper (she's supposed to be a stripper, that is, even though all she does is wander disinterestedly onstage in a white lingerie outfit with fuzzy angel wings, walk around the pole a few times, and then wander off, while all the extras jump around hooting it up as though Bettie Page were prancing amongst them in pasties and a G-string) named Rachel (the cutely-named Cherish Lee, AMERICAN HISTORY X) who, after leaving the strip club one night after work (it's supposed to be a strip club, that is, although it looks more like one of those abandoned warehouses that the Penguin or the Riddler used to hang out in), gets run over by a taxicab in a not-too-convincingly-staged stunt.
But instead of dying like she was supposed to, she gets up and staggers toward the wrecked cab to see if the driver's all right. Suddenly a homeless guy (James C. Burns) grabs her and says, "Stay in the light." His character isn't explained, but somehow he knows that if you cheat death, the Grim Reaper is going to come after you and your only defense is to stay in the light. He shows up again later on in the movie, but his character isn't explained then, either.
So Rachel and the cab driver are taken to the hospital, and when Rachel sneaks into the room where the cab driver is to see how he's doing, she witnesses the Grim Reaper cramming his scythe through the guy's midsection. The actor playing the cab driver spits out a big mouthful of fake blood, which is one of the film's most-used gore motifs. When the frantic Rachel tries to tell a sinister-looking nurse what she's just seen, the nurse jams a hypo in her arm and knocks her out.
Rachel wakes up in a dark, creepy mental institution and meets the chain-smoking Dr. Brown (Brent Fidler), a menacing figure with an eee-vil agenda. She also meets her fellow inmates, whom Rachel later discovers have also cheated death somehow. There's Tia (Turiya Dawn), a suicide survivor, and Katie, who was blinded with acid by a jealous boyfriend after he accused her of looking at other guys, although actress Rebekah Brandes has a hard time convincing us her character is blind since she always looks right at people when she's talking to them.
There's also Stuart (Mike Korich), an emotionally-disturbed schlub who is constantly sketching charcoal portraits of the Grim Reaper; Pete (Peter Bisson), who just can't seem to get enough of them meds; and Nick (Nick Mathis), who I can't really remember anything noteworthy about but it doesn't really matter since these characters are simply there to give the Grim Reaper more midsections to shove his scythe through. And since they aren't very good actors anyway, I wasn't all that broken up about it.
Meanwhile, Rachel's medical-school boyfriend Liam (Benjamin Pitts, who isn't a very good actor, either, but hey, it's his first movie) has been searching high and low for her and, thanks to the mysteriously all-knowing Homeless Dude, finds out that she's being held at St. Joseph's, a mental institution that was closed decades earlier due to inmate abuse. He shows up just in time to stumble into the middle of the Grim Reaper's fake-bloody killing spree, in which several of the inmates are dispatched by beheading, bisection (a fairly nice effect), electrocution, and having a scythe crammed through their midsections.
Not much of this is very scary or suspenseful, and the film tends to drag just when it should be picking up momentum. But at least we get to find out why they've all been brought to the institution--it seems Dr. Brown, who was about to die from chokin' down all them coffin nails, made a deal with the Grim Reaper in which, in return for his life, he would gather up all the people who had cheated death and bring them to one location so that the Grim Reaper wouldn't have to trudge all over town looking for them. No, I'm not making that up. Apparently the dreaded Grim Reaper is a lazy bastard who can't be bothered to just pop in on his victims wherever they may be, like we always imagined him doing. You can almost hear the MST3K robots shouting, "Hey! One-stop shopping!" But, incredibly, Dr. Brown beats them to it by using the phrase himself. D'OH!
It's here in the not-so-good doctor's office that Rachel discovers a really thick book, pages through it for about two seconds, and somehow comes up with the whole "cheating death/circle of life" thing that I mentioned earlier, which I didn't understand any more than the scriptwriters did and didn't really feel like rewinding in order to try and figure it out. But before we can be further confounded by such complexities Liam shows up and Rachel explains to him that the only way to beat the Reaper is for her to die and be brought back to life. Although all of this might seem a bit much for Liam to grasp in such a short time--since it's, like, totally nuts--it only takes about a minute before he's jamming a hypo full of deadly chemicals into Rachel's bloodstream. Which allows her to go into some kind of alternate spirit dimension where she can have a final showdown with the Grim Reaper and zzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzz...
All in all, this was a pretty dumb movie, and the story didn't make all that much sense, and the Grim Reaper wasn't all that grim, really, but I didn't actually hate it or anything. In fact, it was mildly entertaining at times. But I'm not going to be giving it to anyone for Christmas, or telling people, "Hoo-boy, you gotta rent this sucker", or watching it again, ever. One good thing about it, though--if the real Grim Reaper is anything like this, then maybe death won't be all that scary after all.
Buy it at Amazon.com
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