The R.I.P Man – Dir. Jamie Langlands
The Terrifier franchise, three films which range from surprisingly good to not surprising, has reminded filmmakers that there is always room for a new horror icon. Just now, I have come up with Seagull Man, a deranged psychopath who ‘pecks’ out the eyes of holidaymakers to compensate for the terrible times he endured in Great Yarmouth as a child. At the end of the film, he is trapped by locals on the condemned pier, which they burn to the ground, the night sky filled with the sound of him squawking in his death throes. The final shot of the film sees families back on the beach enjoying themselves, only for a seagull to land in front of the camera and wink at us.
Reprehensible, you might rightly assert, and yet it’s still better than the antagonist of The R.I.P. Man, a gummy killer who removes one tooth from each of his victims. Alden Pick was affected with a rare oral disease as a child, something which is clumsily explained to us amid a stream of exposition, lest we can’t cope with the machinations of a low-budget horror plot. Nothing wrong with low-budget horror, everyone has to start somewhere, and you can film on your phone and get away with it.
Set in unassuming, quite posh, West Sussex, it’s trope o’clock as a gaggle of ferociously annoying students josh around and do ver bants, as in the background their number starts to dwindle as a mysterious killer stalks them down one by one. All of which is fine, realistically, I’ve just described 43% of all horror films from the last 40 years, and we have the added value of it being set somewhere ‘different’ for a change, so where does it all go wrong? And yes, it really does go wrong.
I’d rather have to watch a film twice to pick up on the nuances and subtleties than to have the film explained to me on the screen in real time. An exasperated detective reaches into the drawer for a bottle of whiskey in the blind-shuttered office with the blue moonlight seeping in. He’s at a loss to explain it all, you see. Chief’ll have his guts for garters. He gets off his arse and speaks gruffly at people, as all policemen do.
A succession of victims tiptoe through increasingly unlikely crypts and graveyards, all lit with the remainder of the European gel and coloured filter reserves, augmented by a smoke machine which has run out of puff. I don’t think I’ve ever been so enraged simply by lighting effects in a film. It’s like the whole thing has been visually autotuned by a Temu stylophone with a ‘my first Dulux colour wheel’ attached. It’s almost painful to sit through – no-one has surely ever thought, “What we need to give the audience is the sensation of watching the film through Quality Street wrappers”.
If nothing else, at least we’ve got a new, interesting killer on the loose. Except we haven’t. Pick would get tuts at a fancy dress party for not trying hard enough. With a slight look of Christopher Lloyd-era Uncle Fester and disgraced panel show annoyance, Lee Hurst, he has no charisma, threat, or pathos, turning up to slowly kill teens who have forgotten how to run and then removing a tooth like he’s delivering the Saviour in a Nativity play. I get the concept – people don’t like dentists. Yet, the gruesome act of denture removal is performed with such uncovincing grue that it’s almost comical. A killing considered akin to putting a girl’s face in a blender looks more like they were slightly careless with the ketchup at Maccy D’s. With only a very limited number of films anyone of standard means is going to make in their lives, surely the ONE thing you’d put your money and effort into in a horror movie is the effects and make-up? You’re only going to get a certain level of actor, as this film proves, and so, come on, at least follow through with your set-up and make the spectacle memorable.
Did I mention that each killing is presaged by a set of chattering wind-up teeth left for the victim to find? Or that there’s a twist 20 minutes from the end? Or that there’s a birthday party scene where the band is allowed to play for just long enough for everyone to think, ‘hey, this combo has actually got a great sound!’ and run out and give them a record deal? Or that ‘R.I.P’ stands for ‘Rest. In. Pain’? Or that the film ends with a seagull winking at the camera? One of us has taken it too far, and I don’t think it’s me.
Daz Lawrence