In the decades since the 1989 release of Fatal Images, filmmaker Dennis Devine has staked out quite a place in low budget, trash horror cinema. Of the thirty-four directorial credits on his IMDb page that have viewer ratings, the average score is 3.8 out of 10. That’s pretty bad. Any single movie that garners a score that low is probably not worth the effort to watch, and that number covers Devine’s entire career. Some would say he should have thrown in the towel a long time ago, but shit on that. Devine is a filmmaker. It doesn’t matter that he makes crap. He makes movies, and no matter how bad they are, there is an audience of mutants out there who reject force fed studio movies — who experience culture outside the big corporate stranglehold on media. Sure, his movies stink. But every blown line, every plot hole, every frame of bland, desaturated magnetic video is a ‘fuck you’ to the moneyed gatekeepers of cinema.
Fatal Images, also written by Devine, with Mike Bowler and Steve Jarvis, is a supernatural slasher flick. Shot on glorious videotape, the film tells the story of deceased serial killer Kurt Cosgrave (David Williams); the camera that holds his murderous spirit (played by a Panon Widelux); and the photographer who buys the camera at a pawnshop, Amy Stewart (Lane Coyle).
Amy is a staff photographer for some newspaper or magazine, and carries around the Widelux as a backup camera while on assignment. Whoever has their picture taken with the camera soon gets a visit from a spectral Cosgrave, who then murders them. Meanwhile, when Amy develops film from the camera, she finds the pictures show the method of her subjects’ killings. That’s a mature plot for a horror flick, one Devine and company took seriously. Just look at the death photograph for this poor young lady:
Yeah. This flick is a real treat.
The murders catch the attention of uniformed police officer Alice Boden (Angela Eads), but not much in the way of detectives. The lone detective investigating the case, John Johnson (Jeff Herbick), distraught from the similarities to Cosgrave’s murders while he was still alive (there is little to no resemblance), crawls into a bottle. Boden, despite her enthusiasm, is a pretty shit detective. Here is this photographer, Amy, who claims that anyone whose picture she takes with this haunted camera turns up dead, and the developed pics show the moment and method of death. That should make Amy the prime suspect. Sure, we out in the audience know what she says is true, but there’s no reason for Boden to take Amy’s story at face value, yet that’s exactly what she does. And that’s why she’s still in uniform and not working homicide.
Really, that’s just poor writing, but it was still amusing to watch Boden hop on board the supernatural train without a second thought.
Bodies, bodies, investigation, more bodies, a minor twist that makes no difference to the film’s resolution, and then denouement. The progression of the plot has no surprises for veteran horror fans, but Devine did manage to get in a funny jumpscare with the camera. The kills have blood, but gore is held back until the last third, and it’s not that good. Budgetary restrictions are no excuse, as the Polonia brothers were working magic with next to nothing around the same time.
The acting in Fatal Images is bad, across all cast members, even the ones that have more than one credit to their names. The dialogue is juvenile, with casual conversations lacking the little touches of colloquialism that keep lines from sounding crafted rather than natural. As noted before, the effects are not special, and the story has the feel of a first draft. Is there anything to recommend this movie? Well, it’s a shot-on-video horror flick, which is a subgenre of horror with its very own enthusiasts. I’m one of them, and sometimes I’m not quite sure why I keep seeking out these movies. Many have the ‘awfuckit’ attitude of the outsider artist, breaking convention and shocking viewers. Fatal Images doesn’t have that. It just happens to be shot on videotape. That makes the movie one for the SOV horror fans only. Fatal Images falls into the nether regions of the Watchability Index, landing at #521, displacing Project Moonbase.