Laid to Rest
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, R, 90 m, 2009
Directed by Robert Hall. Stars Bobbi Sue Luther, Kevin Gage, Lena Headey, et al.

I never go into a slasher film expecting to take much away from it. If anything, most slice ‘n’ dicers are only good at taking something away from me: my time, my money, my confidence in the human race. So, it’s always a nice surprise when the genre serves up something that I can noodle on after the last bead of red, red krovvy falls. Mind you, it’s rarely anything thematic; it tends to be some sort of technical advance. In the case of Laid to Rest, it’s the innovative makeup work that demands consideration. The director, Robert Hall, lent his genius as a special makeup effects artist to a gazillion and one pictures before he finally gave directing a go in Lightning Bug, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story in which he proved that he was almost as good at working with real actors as he was with slashing, burning, and blowing up their foam latex counterparts. But the Fangoria boys are in for a real treat this time: Laid to Rest is a balls-out “video nasty” that allows for Hall to fully indulge his love of pretend butchery. Though Hall’s protégé, Erik Porn (I swear on my mother’s eyes, that’s his name), is officially in charge of the money shots this time out, Hall’s uncommonly high standards for such things drive Porn to go above and beyond the call of duty. And the two (along with a bunch of other clever folks) have dreamed up a very simple though very scary killer: a svelte, black-clad baldy who spends his nights prowling country back roads (in a pimped ride, no less) with a briefcase full of custom-made knives and a shoulder-mounted camcorder, its red indicator light shooting through the darkness like the laser sight on a gun. What really distinguishes this nameless screwball, though, is his shimmering, chrome skeleton mask; it reflects his victims’ horror-struck faces when he disembowels them. (At times I was reminded of an endoskeleton from the Terminator movies.) When Jason Voorhees slipped a hockey mask over his repulsive puss in Friday the 13^th Part III, nobody mixed up in the project could’ve predicted that it would become the franchise’s defining image—it was one of those happy accidents. But Chrome Skull’s demonic visage has been sculpted with actor Nick Principe’s features in mind, so it has more of an organic—and thus a much eerier—quality. We never see the face of the man behind the mask, but it doesn’t really matter; he’s been written as an implacable killing machine, like Michael Myers or the T-1000. But those guys look like Disneyland walk-around characters next to ol’ Chrome Skull; he guts his prey with a finesse that would make even the most adroit knife pitchman on the Atlantic City boardwalk feel like a greenhorn. Look, I’m not the sort of critic who’s prone to hyperbole, so when I say that this is by far the grisliest thing I’ve seen in moons, the fainthearted better take note.

The plot of Laid to Rest hardly matters. What does matter, at least to gorehounds, is the blood-and-guts quotient, and it’s high enough here to satisfy a wake of vultures. The fun begins when a busty brunette (played by the director’s wife, Bobbi Sue Luther, who also produced) comes to in a locked coffin. She manages to break free, only to discover that she’s stuck in a funeral home after hours. She’s not sure how she got there, but she’s damned sure she has to get out. Well, that’s not going to be easy, seeing how Chrome Skull is loitering in the vestibule. At first I assumed that the girl’s function here was not unlike Drew Barrymore’s in Scream, which was to whet the audience’s appetite for the monster’s post-opening titles killing spree by breaking down and oozing life with enough theatricality to reap kudos from beyond Gloria Swanson’s grave. But the girl manages to elude the tip of her attacker’s blade and get outside, only now she has to spend the rest of the picture running barefoot through the chilly countryside as the overgrown Halloweenigan tries to finish his job on her. Of course, most of the poor souls that she goes to for help wind up with pennies on their eyes (that is if Chrome Skull hasn’t carved them out); the stiffs start piling up like hundred-dollar chips on Chris “Jesus” Ferguson’s side of the poker table. Initially, the girl comes off as a big dummy (and that’s saying something for this kind of show), but when it’s revealed that she incurred a nasty crack on the noggin before she was potted in the “dead box” (her words), all the lame-brained things she does to undermine her escape begin to make sense. It’s a cunning trick, really: Most slasher films rely on the killer’s victims to make dumb choices for the show to go on, but Laid to Rest is shameless in how it uses its heroine’s head trauma to excuse what is really just the idiocy of the script. The gruesome goings-on are seen entirely from the girl’s perspective, so we’re rarely clued into something that she isn’t, and that makes for an unsettling experience, if not for an often-confusing one.

If Laid to Rest is about anything, it’s about the value of having access to a landline in the event of an emergency. Cellular phones are worthless in this genre, especially if the action is set in the sticks; it’s harder to find a good signal there than it is to find someone with an iota of sense in Berkeley, CA. But for our put upon amnesiac, finding a local yokel who’s still using Ma Bell is even harder: Tucker (Kevin Gage), a good ol’ boy with a bum leg, saw his service cut off when he fell behind on his bill, while Steven (Sean Whalen), a computer nerd who’s grieving the recent loss of his mother, is only able to communicate with the outside world via the Internet. (When he sends the police an email on the girl’s behalf, it takes literally hours to get a response, and then it’s only more forms that need to be filled out.) The supporting cast rocks (especially Gage, who gets to play a good guy for once), but Luther more than holds her own in her first starring role. And as grimy and bloody and she gets during this unyielding scare-a-thon, she still can’t help but look beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that you know Chrome Skull isn’t playing with a full deck if he can’t imagine doing anything to her other than bumping her off. I’m coming to realize that it’s not Hall and company’s pioneering gore effects that capture my thoughts when I reflect upon Laid to Rest, but rather it’s Luther’s breathtaking comeliness. She’s a more compelling sight than any spurting jugular vein. 

October 19, 2009 

© Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.

Run, Luther, Run: Bobbi Sue has had enough of Chrome Skull's sick tricks in Laid to Rest.