Needle – (Screamfest) Review

Needle is the type of film that will polarize most people. I really dug the film but I can see where a lot of horror fans wouldn’t. It’s fairly light on gore, at least compared to the heavy amounts of red stuff in recent horror cinema, and at times it evokes comparisons to the much maligned 90s era of serial killer flicks. If you’re willing to look past these elements however, you’ll find an above average slasher with a refreshingly original plot device.

In the film our protagonist Ben Rutherford (Michael Dorman) gets a strange box shaped device from his late father’s estate. That night he gets drunk with his friends and wakes up to discover that the box is missing. Soon after his friends start dying in a mysterious fashion and it’s revealed that somebody is using the box to create wax voodoo dolls to dispatch the college kids. Marcus and his estranged brother Ben (Travis Fimmel) go on a desperate search for the box and the killer, hoping to find both before more of thier friends are murdered.

The use of voodoo dolls in a “civilized” setting is very original. While voodoo has been used many times as a plot device in horror films, it’s usually done in conjunction with a tribal setting. The only other slasher that I can remember that used voodoo dolls in a modern setting was a brief scene in the original Child’s Play. I also really liked how it set up the who-done-it mystery. Instead of having a slasher in a mask stalking the kids we get a pair of black gloves in close shots, grinding the gears of the box and then enacting punishment on the voodoo dolls. The use of black gloves is an awesome call back to the Italian giallo films of the 70s and 80s. Those films employed similar mystery plot lines and I like the flick’s homages to that genre. I also liked that the film goes out of its way to hide the identity of the killer. While there are multiple clues that will lead sharp minds to identify him/her pretty quickly, we also get some red herrings that will keep most people off the scent until the big reveal.

The possible kill scenes when using of death by voodoo are almost infinite and I was happy to see that each one was different from the last. The only issue I had with the deaths is that there simply isn’t enough of them. When the killer is revealed it makes sense that they would only want to stick to the main group of friends but I could have used some extra kills. The gorehounds will also be disappointed in the relatively clean kills. We do get one scene of over the top gore but other than that most of the kills are fairly simple. I actually dug this approach, as I didn’t feel that the film really called for a ton of gore. This isn’t Hatchet folks. Another thing I dug about these scenes is the editing style. In most modern horror flicks, the editing is incredibly quick and distracting for no discernible purpose. Here, the editing is still quick but it serves a purpose as it’s cutting in between the killer cutting the voodoo doll and the victim experiencing the results. In many cases the cuts to the voodoo doll enhance the kills. For example, if we had just stayed on the victim during one of the deaths we would simply see a bunch of cuts randomly appearing on his skin. Cutting back to the voodoo doll though we get the cringe inducing moment of a white hot needle being pressed into the doll and then immediately see the result on the victim himself. Also, cutting to the voodoo dolls in this manner is an ingenious way to work around a small budget as it’s far cheaper to punish a wax figure than it is to create gore effects.

Overall, I really dug Needle. It’s not a perfect film but it’s a fun little slasher flick that I can see gaining a large audience on video. Hopefully it makes enough to warrant a sequel with a bigger budget as the further possibilities of a voodoo slasher fill my sick little mind with glee.

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