Review of Frayed (2007) by Matt S — 27 Aug 2009

During the opening credits of Frayed, a small girl, Sara, is having her birthday party, it is apparent through the home videos that something is fishy about the girl's brother who misbehaves at the party and his sent to his room, only for the mother to come up to console him but winds up meeting the business end of a baseball bat in a rather chilling death.

The boy gets taken away to a mental hospital where he grows up, not speaking and letting his mental state worsen. Naturally, a series of unfortunate events leads to the escape of the disturbed patient who goes on a killing spree as he chases one of the security guards through the woods for a good bit of the movie, eventually leading back to his sister and her friends where more bodies pile up.

This forces the father, the town Sheriff, with the dilemma of having to hunt down, stop, and possibly kill his son. The synopsis makes this sound like a pretty interesting movie, which it is, however, it borrow heavily from the likes of Halloween, Identity, and especially High Tension.

Those with a well-functioning brain and a history of horror movie watching will IMMEDIATELY figure out the twist within the first 30 minutes of this rather overlong movie. Aside from some time shaving, the film is a small surprise amidst the miles of direct to DVD horror films that usually come out.

This film was made on a VERY small budget, but one would never think that upon watching this thanks to how nicely done this film is and how surprisingly mainstream is seems. With 5 writers, I was expecting more than a collage of things we've seen in better movies, but I gotta say their efforts were noble and knowing and thinking about the twist throughout nearly the entire movie left me open for not seeing a bigger twist that completely changed the movie and somehow made it more chilling.

Kudos to the filmmakers for that. Good acting, decent slasher scares, decent story. The film just needed more original ideas and a lot of fat trimmed from it.