Your Fear. His Amusement. His pleasure is your pain.
That’s the tagline for the Warner Brothers direct to video horror move, Amusement.
The story synopsis of Amusement is that a twisted thread ties Tabitha (Katheryn Winnick), Shelby (Laura Breckinridge) and Lisa (Jessica Lucas) together in an anthology of seemingly unrelated vignettes. All three women are being stalked by a killer with a grudge that extends back to the girls’ childhoods, all of which puts these friends and other potential victims into a struggle to survive.
The premise for this direct to video horror movie sounds very promising and and as touted, each girl’s initial run in with the psycho that is stalking them is done in vignettes. As individual pieces of work, these vignettes are very well crafted and have a lot of suspense and frenetic energy in them that any horror movie needs to be considered scary. Each of the girls is stalked and terrorized in a unique and individual manner that play on various psychological issues that are common for many people.
The problem lies in the fact that they are too unique and individual and there is nothing to indicate that these three events are somehow connected to each other. While I realize that the producers and writers of Amusement purposefully intended for it to be this way, possibly trying for something a bit ‘art house or indie movie’, I found that as a viewer this no sense of cohesion or interlinking worked against the movie. Coupling that with the fact that the stalker has a totally different kind of physical appearance in each vignette and for me it leaves too much disjointed confusion.
This movie is not with out solid talent in the key roles. Especially blonde Etobicoke, Canada, born and raised beauty, Katheryn Winnick as Tabitha whose run in with the stalker is more detailed and defined than the the other two girls have with him. Tabitha is a strong willed and resourceful young woman the likes of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Cutis in the original Halloween) and Sarah Palmer (Jamie King in the recent remake of My Bloody Valentine). Keir O’Donnell as the stalker plays creepy psycho to the max and really convinces you of how utterly maniacal and deranged this character really is.
My other issue was that once everyone was brought together, things were way too rushed. For me, it felt like there was major scenes or key pieces of the plot missing that would bring it all together and give it a stronger storyline.
For me, the lack of cohesion and the disjointed feel to the movie left me wondering what Amusement could have been had it not gone for such a ‘art house, indie movie’ feel and had instead went for being a straightforward horror movie.
Final Grade = C
Reviewed by M R Reed
Images from Amusement copyright2009 to and courtesy of Warner Brothers Home Video.