31 Days of Halloween - Day 2 - Movie 2

If you're the sort of person who won't watch a horror movie made before John Carpenter's "Halloween," prefers the slasher sub-genre, and mainly watches a horror movie for the extremely realistic, yet over the top bloodbath special effects, then "Laid To Rest" (2009) is for you. If you're the kind of person who cares about things like plot, suspense, and decent characters then you should avoid this movie.

"Laid To Rest" is about a young woman who wakes up in a coffin in a mortuary with no memory of who she is, or how she got there. She quickly finds herself on the run from a serial killer who calls himself ChromeSkull, because he wears a chrome skull mask glued to his face. He also wears a video camera on his shoulder and is fond of really big serrated bowie knives. As the woman searches for help, and finds it, she brings everyone she encounters to ChromeSkull's murderous attentions, leading to one specatacular gory death after another.

This movie has no suspense whatsoever and actors trying their best with no characters to work with, meaning we don't care about any of them. I was never interested in who this woman was, or where she came from, nor were the filmmakers, since the reveal didn't matter to the story one bit. To top it off, ChromeSkull is a lame monster/killer. He's tall, and that's about it. He's not at all menacing, pretty clumsy, and with the director's lack of skill at building suspense, never much of a threat.

The special effects by Almost Human, Inc. are pretty impressive, if you can admire someone having their face sawed away from the rest of their head. A combination of practical make-up effects and CGI, there are only a few brief moments where they are less than convincing and the CGI is too obvious.

"Laid To Rest" really feels like a demo real for these effects, like one of those infomercials with Lorenzo Lamas where a rudimentary plot is tacked on to a demonstration of the BowFlex exercising system. This comes as no surprise since the movie's writer/director is Robert Hall, founder of Almost Human Inc.