Director – Brian Avenet-Bradley (Dark Remains)
Starring – Gary Cairns (Criminal Minds, Justified), Brad Dourif (Child’s Play, Halloween), and Nick Nicotera (Basement Jack, 8-Bit Animal Playhouse with Jason Mewes)
Release Date – 2013
Rating – 2.5/5
Tagline – “The experiment is real”
The horror game has so many amazing legends that has built up amazing careers in the genre only to fall into bit parts and small cameos. One such actor is the talented Brad Dourif. Fans may remember Dourif from his amazing filmography. Dourif has stared in Child’s Play, Romb Zombie’s Halloween, Death Machine, The Exorcist III, Lord of the Rings, Body Parts, Alien: Resurrection, and so many more.
A few months back I was sent the horror thriller Malignant to review. I instantly noticed Dourif on the cover and was excited. Deep down I knew this would be another horror flick that wastes the talent of a horror legend by reducing him to just a cameo or small screen time but I still wanted to check it out. Thanks MVD for sending this one my way.
**Spoiler Alert**The film follows a young man who is battling his inner demons after losing the love of his life. When his beautiful bride to be dies he soon finds himself in a whirlwind of depression consulting the bottle as a way to cope. He wakes up from being blackout drunk and finds his chest stitched up with something metal underneath his skin. He then receives a phone call from a deranged doctor saying that he agreed to let the doctor help him with his alcohol problem.
All the man has to do it give the doctor his undivided attention and support. The doctor then tells him not to touch alcohol. The young man does not listen and hits up the bar. He awakens the next morning covered in blood with a video on his computer. He watches it and finds himself killing a beautiful young blonde. He then receives another call from the doctor instructing him to avoid alcohol again or this will happen again. The man, once again, does not listen and drinks.
The doctor takes over and kills someone else. The doctor is now frustrated with his new patient and kidnaps him and performs a lobotomy to remove drinking from his daily routine. A day or two passes and the man enters a liquor store and passes out on the sidewalk. The doctor picks him up and takes him back to his lab only to discover that he was not drunk and played a doctor to get his revenge.**Spoiler Alert**
So many great horror actors fall into the cameo rut forcing fans to buy films with their names plastered all over it just to see them on screen for 10 or 15 minutes. To me, buying a mediocre movie because a certain actor is in it for $20 just to see them for 10 minutes is a total rip off. Malignant gave me more Brad Dourif screen time than I expected but still fell into the mediocre category that I like to call Wal-Mart Horror.
The acting in this one is solid but the film is, more or less, a one man show. The film’s star, Gary Cairns, does a decent job as the film’s only character with any depth while the remainder of the cast fills in the gaps with no real back stories or details given about them to make them stick out. This sucks considering how much of a pivotal character the doctor played by Dourif really is.
The story for this one is rather bland and boring while giving the viewer nothing to tie them over until the story starts. Most of the film is a one man in his apartment trying to figure out what is going on with his life. This was very boring which makes it hard for the viewer to pay attention. The story really needed something else to pull the viewer in.
Finally, the film does not really have any on screen kills but it does have some great practical effects. The film unfolds more like a thriller instead of a horror film, which if marketed and edited correctly, would have been a better thriller than a horror film. Overall, Malignant is a slow moving horror film that offers nothing to the horror fan. The film is beautifully shot but the camera work can not save this flat horror flick.
