We Feed on Their Fear
Main Cast: Mike Vogel, Christina Cole
Director: Dario Piana
Each year there are movies produced that are never seen by the public. Their content is considered too graphic, too disturbing, too shocking for general audiences. This is one of those films.
THE DEATHS OF IAN STONE was one of the After Dark Horrorfest movies I was most looking forward to seeing. The synopsis alone filled my head with all kinds of awesome images, possibilities the movie could offer, potentially mind-blowing experiences that would inspire me for a long time to come.
“Ian Stone is trapped in a constant cycle of dying every night, only to wake up with a different life.”
Yeah, that sounds like something right up my alley. I love all that alternate reality/lives stuff. So I was pretty eager to get to this movie, totally ready to be amazed.
Wrong.
THE DEATHS OF IAN STONE started off pretty good. Ian is a college student, a hockey player, who blows the last shot of the game when he doesn’t realize the clock has stopped. Upset, he takes his girlfriend Jenny home, then heads to his own place. On the way, he comes across a body in the road. Ian gets out to help, but the body ends up tossing Ian into the path of an oncoming train.
When he wakes up, Ian finds himself in an office. He’s got a different life, finds he never played hockey, and Jenny isn’t his girlfriend, but a co-worker. He questions his sanity, wonders if something might be wrong with him, but his girlfriend, Medea, assures him it’s nothing. Then she kills him.
When Ian wakes up, he’s a cab driver, driving Jenny to her parents’ home.
And again, it’s the same thing. Ian is killed, wakes up in a different life, is killed again. And always, somewhere in the periphery of his new life, there’s Jenny.
Another constant appears to be an old man, Gray, who is trying to help Ian.
“You have to remember, Ian. They’re already coming. But whatever you do, don’t let them find her. If they find out, they can do terrible things to her. And that will be the end for you.”
All is coming along decently. It’s not the best horror movie I’ve ever seen, and the plot device I was so looking forward to is missing opportunities left and right to astonish the viewer, but it’s a pretty interesting concept anyway. So far. Then, about 50 minutes in, as junkie-Ian and his upstairs-neighbor Jenny are on the run from the creatures that have burst into Jenny’s apartment trying to kill Ian, they board a train and Jenny falls asleep against Ian’s shoulder when Gray appears and gives Ian this valuable bit of information about the creatures chasing him.
“We feed on their fear . . . It sustains us, but we corrupted ourselves. We began feeding on human pain as well, searching for it everywhere. Almost like an addiction. And the fear one of them experiences the moment before a violent death is most potent. Our drug of choice. Once you’ve tasted it, you never want to stop. You need it more and more, and when you can’t find it you have to kill for it. That’s what turned us from parasites into predators. You just keep hunting, waiting to feed again . . . You hurt them. You did something to them and they won’t let you remember it until they can work out how to bring you back into the fold… or destroy you.”
What the!?!?! Gray is one of them? And, if this bit of info is what I think it is, SO IS IAN!?!?!
Yeah, I never said the script was great. And it was at this point the movie fell completely apart for me. The idea of Ian dying and waking up again in different lives over and over got my attention. When I saw the creatures chasing him from life to life and how goofy they looked, my attention began to wane. When I found out Ian is one of these creatures, turned on his brethren–obviously due to his love for Jenny, otherwise why is she so important–my attention was shot.
I wanted to love this movie. It’s one thing to expect a movie is going to be crap and to have that suspicion confirmed, but it’s an entirely different thing when what you thought was going to be the shit turns out to be just shit. And to add insult to injury, there’s the Harvester-Ian as he appears during the movie’s climax. Holy crap. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Mike Vogel (CLOVERFIELD, Under the Dome) turns in a decent enough performance as Ian. He’s got the good looks and intensity to flesh out the character and make him look convincing, no matter which life he’s living, while Christina Cole (WHAT A GIRL WANTS, MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY) as Jenny has a wide-eyed innocence, but, luckily, plays pretty much the same “character” in every version of Ian’s lives. The villain in all this, Medea, is played very well by Jaime Murray who, if you saw her run as Lila on Dexter, you know very well the kind of evil bitch she plays.
There’s nothing I can say against the acting, other than the awful script they had to deliver. For me, this movie failed mainly because the plot had so much potential, but in the end just fell into such a predictably bad cliché I lost all respect for it. And while most of the effects were pretty cool, the overall look of the creatures was, again, pretty cliché. The story felt like writer Brendan Hood had an intriguing idea, got started on it, then realized halfway through he had no follow-through, so decided to go with whatever easy cliché he could think of. Then again, he wrote THEY, so I’m not entirely surprised.
Dario Piana directed THE DEATHS OF IAN STONE, and he’s not bad. I guess. The story was easy to follow, and he provided several creepy shots of the harvesters. Mostly I just have a hard time getting over how terribly the story fell apart halfway through, and then how completely foolish Harvester-Ian looked. I mean there aren’t words to describe it.
THE DEATHS OF IAN STONE starts off great, sinks down to good, then rounds it out by ending terribly. This movie was, for me, just a big disappointment.
More 8 Films to Die For II
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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