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Visually horrific but lacks the emotional punch to be truly memorable

I have a confession to make. I love Clive Barker and whenever a new film based on his work is released, I run to see it. I believe it will be a problem that will be my undoing. The latest Barker project based on his Books of Blood series is Dread. The least gory of Barker adaptations, Dread explores the inner demons we all harbor instead of demons from hell.

Barker is a hard author to adapt. His early work is adult to adapt to the screen. It’s too gory, too sexual or too extreme to adequately film. First time director and producer of recent Barker adaptations The Midnight Meat Train and Book of Blood Anthony DiBasi takes an interesting concept and almost successfully pulls it off.

Stephen (Jackson Rathbone) is a film student who is approached by a philosophy student named Quaid (Shaun Evans) to make a documentary about people talking about their fears and what they dread. Enlisting the help of an editor friend Cheryl (Hanne Steen), the three start their project.  Quaid becomes more and more obsessed with the project do to watching his parents get murdered by a psychopath. Eventually, Quaid takes the project to the next level with horrific results.

Jackson Rathbone is about to become a household name due to his being in the next two Twilight films. Fortunately he’s a good actor and turns in a strong performance. Rathbone carries the film and his unkempt nature gives the film the grounding it needs. Same can be said for Hanne Steen. The two plays off each other well and in the final moments of the film, her performance is unsettling. The same cannot be said about Shaun Evans’ Quaid. He doesn’t carry the menace or psychosis to make his villain believable. He works better in the first half of the film as the residence jerk but once he has to cross over to real villainy, he comes off more cartoonish in comparison with the rest of the performances.

DiBlase does a fine job in his directorial debut. The film is well shot and he has an understanding of what makes a Barker story work. Dread takes a while to get off the ground and drags by about ten minutes in the middle, but he brings it all together with blend of Martyrs and Saw that creates some disturbing imagery but lacks tension. The film takes forever to get to the end and relies too heavily on Evans to sell the scares. Unfortunately for DiBlase he didn’t cast a strong enough actor to help build the tension. In the end, it’s visually horrific but lacks the emotional punch to be truly memorable.  Of the recent Barker adaptations, Dread is a good entry but not as good as it could have been.

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