Laid to Rest (Unrated Director's Cut)

This is a very cool movie loaded with gore,story starts with a girl waking up with no memory and inside a coffin. She is in a mortuary and the guy who grabbed her gets yelled at by the head mortician,who gets knifed. The girl with no memory barely escapes to find an old guy and his wife and they take her in with great suspicion...until Chromeskull(the killer) shows up and gets the chance to prove he is real by offing the guy's wife right in front of him. Then the girl and the old guy are on the run and then come across a nerd who tries to help by calling the cops. The killer is right behind them as a game of cat & mouse ensues. The nerdy guy is grief stricken cuz his mother just died,so chromeskull takes her corpse and scares the nerdy guy alot. The people get to find out just how many people get to fall victim to Chromeskull and there are tons. The gore factor is high here there is so much violence here and it isn't cheesy looking CGI it is oldschool makeup and fake blood with dummies & the CGI is very little but it does not look forced. The girl watches a tape of how she was captured. She was a callgirl who enjoyed her narcotics til' she took a bat to the head. That is why she has amnesia,the fight ends in a grocery store/gas station. The girl kills chromeskull by putting a chemical in his glue adhesive that keeps the mask on his face,well it melts his face off and she beats him to a pulp. The movie ends with them driving away headed for Atlanta. There is another film that is a followup to this but it is more of a prequel. I suggest you check it out it is gory and it is downright cool.

I ordered this movie thanks to boredom: I had already purchased and/or rented every other scary movie I could find, so (despite the tacky pirate-esque cover) I decided to order this one. Needless to say, I wasn't expecting much at all, especially after seeing the stills of the man wearing his shiny chrome mask. Well, I can honestly say, I was shocked...this movie was actually quite good! The acting was pretty stellar seeing as to how the only people I had seen before was the guy from People Under The Stairs and the other guy that used to be married to Christina Applegate from the Prom Night remake (now THAT movie was horrible!). The death scenes were some of the best I've ever witnessed! In one scene outside of the older man's house, his wife is stabbed with a knife in the head...and you can see her eyeball shaking when he pulls the knife back out! Just amazingly gross! There was also just a small hint of humor in this movie that I really appreciated. I'm not a big comedy girl, nor do I like the whole scary-movie-meets-black-humor thing, but this was just subtle enough to be quite clever and enjoyable. No, they don't really explain much about Chrome Skull...but this is one movie where you really don't mind the open mystery at the end. The sequel, however, tries to dive into the story of Chrome Skull a bit more...and, WARNING!: the whole movie blows in a very generic, been-there done-that kinda way. Not scary or even a quarter as cool as this one. So, to sum it all up: love this one, hate the sequel.

I like the bad dream aspect of the setting, shot at night in the middle of nowhere. I love the inauspicious entrance of the lead character (falling out of a coffin). And you can't go wrong with a masked killer, especially when the mask is shiny and shaped like a skull. The pace is unrelenting. The deaths are shocking and plentiful. They even managed to inject a little humor (the guy with no phone but he has got a computer). I only have one criticism and that concerns the disorienting opening sequence, a montage for the credits that neither helped create the mood for this film, nor did it add any insight for what was to follow. It was just a lot of noise and chopped up images. I consider it a wasted opportunity that could have paved the way for what came after it. Other than that, this is just the type of slasher flick blueprint I want other filmmakers to take note of and follow. Seriously, we are getting low on films in this genre. I definitely have room for more.