Unrest Year: 2006 Director: Jason Todd Ipson Written by: Chris Billett, Jason Todd Ipson Threat: Spirit Weapon of Choice: Glass Based upon: none Color/B&W/3D: colour Language: English Country of Origin: USA IMDb page:

Other movies in this series:
Please see the After Dark Horrorfest series page.

Rish's Reviews
Unrest is the third movie in the 2006 After Dark Horrorfest we've seen for the site. I was especially keen on watching this series, planning on viewing them all in a weekend, or one especially ambitious night. So far, though, we've watched three of them in the space of two weeks, and that may be the best we can do.
In a hospital scarier than tyranist's grandmother's toyroom, a group of first year medical students learn about cadaver disection first hand . . . and one of them learns that even though a body is dead, its influence can continue. One particular body seems lonely, since it proceeds to create new corpses out of the people that come in contact with it.
I gotta start out by telling you that the title Unrest is a great one. Short, sweet, to-the-point, semi-unique, and somehow creepy. Unfortunately, that's the best thing about the movie. And does it tell you anything that it was originally titled Possession? I think The Possession was the movie we saw, and a movie befitting the title Unrest is still out there. They could have titled this one Student Body and called it good.
The lead actress was quite attractive, and the filmmakers had her strip down to her bra close to a thousand times. I don't know how I feel about that, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it.
The med students/Gross Anatomy aspects of the movie were pretty interesting, really. I could tell they had done some research as far as the class and cadavers go. Unfortunately, it's the Horror movie aspects that fail utterly.
God, they had maybe the scariest setting for a horror movie since 2001's Session 9, with all these long, dark but sterile corridors and automatic lights that only turn on when you're directly underneath them that you could've had Clint Howard playing the ghost and it still would've been scary. Heck, a department store mannequin with a white sheet over it would've been pants-fillingly terrifying in a location like that. But sadly, I had to quote Bartholemew J. Simpson more than once: "You know what would've been scarier than nothing? ANYTHING!!"
And that's too bad.
One of the films I've most lambasted in recent memory was 2007's The Messengers. I got frothingly angry after that movie because there was so damn much wrong with it. Well, it may be that Unrest had even more wrong with it than The Messengers.
I know there's a good movie with this same premise and same cast buried somewhere underneath this. I told tyranist that if the second Robin had just done another draft of the screenplay (oh, I called the writer/director "The Second Robin" because his name was Jason Todd, the name of the DC Comics' second Robin, Batman's sidekick, sorry) or given the script to a community college screenwriting class to go over, the film would've been a good one. But in talking about it afterward, the whole film was just so badly done, that it's possible William Goldman, Andrew Kevin Walker, and Charlie Kaufman couldn't have saved it.
Another thing. Though I've had nothing but negative to say about this film, I will say this one good thing: it was better than Dark Ride.
It's hard to make films. It's the hardest of all the arts because it tends to combine pretty much all of the arts. And it's got to irritate the Jason Todd Ipsons of the world to read the words of a unhandsome pockmarked pilot fish sitting on his ever-tightening easy chair bathed in the unhealthy glow of his computer screen under his Barbarella poster, typing out what's wrong with a film somebody else spent money, time, and life on.
But that seems to be my role, and until that changes, take my word that Unrest isn't a movie that you need to waste an evening on.
Posted: July 4, 2007

The tyranist's thoughts
It's usually pretty easy to get myself excited to see a horror movie. Even when the case the DVD comes in looks like crap and the trailer looks awful, there's usually something to look forward to. If there wasn't, we would have stopped seeing horror flicks a long, long time ago.
Unrest bills itself as the first film made with real cadavers, which may or may not be true. I don't doubt they used real cadavers, but I sort of doubt they were the first ever. That was something to look forward to, but really, when you get right down to it, they didn't look any better than cadavers that aren't real. And since that was the pull of this movie, when the plot and acting disappeared, it got really depressing really fast.
Rish is right about the setting. It was terrifying. It shouldn't be hard to make a scary movie in that setting. But they managed to just sort of suck the life out of the whole thing. It's like they thought we'd be impressed that they were using real corpses and that fact would somehow influence our experience. It didn't.
The whole After Dark marketing campaign centres around "Films They Don't Want You to See." Whoever the "They" is in this case, I'm starting to think we should thank them for screening out this kind of dreck.
Posted: July 4, 2007

Total Skulls: 33

Sequel
Sequel setup
Rips off earlier film
Horror film showing on TV/in theater in movie
Future celebrity appears
Former celebrity appears
Bad title
Bad premise
Bad acting
Bad dialogue
Bad execution
MTV Editing
OTS
Girl unnecessarily gets naked
Wanton sex
Death associated with sex
Unfulfilled promise of nudity
Characters forget about threat
Secluded location
Power is cut
Phone lines are cut
Someone investigates a strange noise
Someone runs up stairs instead of going out front door
Camera is the killer
Victims cower in front of a window/door
Victim locks self in with killer
Victim running from killer inexplicably falls
Toilet stall scene
Shower/bath scene
Car stalls or won't start
Cat jumps out
Fake scare
Laughable scare
Stupid discovery of corpse
Dream sequence
Hallucination/Vision
No one believes only witness
Crazy, drunk, old man knows the truth
Warning goes unheeded
Music detracts from scene
Death in first five minutes
x years before/later
Flashback sequence
Dark and stormy night
Killer doesn't stay dead
Killer wears a mask
Killer is in closet
Killer is in car with victim
Villain is more sympathetic than heroes
Unscary villain/monster
Beheading
Blood fountain
Blood spatters - camera, wall, etc.
Poor death effect
Excessive gore
No one dies at all
Virgin survives
Geek/Nerd survives
Little kid lamely survives
Dog/Pet miraculously survives
Unresolved subplots
"It was all a dream" ending
Unbelievably happy ending
Unbelievably crappy ending
What the hell?