Some days I remember the younger me as an idiot. That is true in many different ways (and the younger me can be the me of decades ago or the me from the last time I drank alcohol), but I am sometimes reminded of it unexpectedly. Take Long Time Dead, for example. This is a British horror film I was looking forward to revisiting, having enjoyed it on VHS when it was first released and remembering it fondly over the intervening years. I believe I have probably mentioned it whenever people have asked for lesser-known horror gems. So getting to rewatch it was a treat. Then I remembered that the younger me was an idiot. Long Time Dead is not good.
Directed by Marcus Adams, someone with only a small selection of features interspersed throughout the many music videos he has helmed, Long Time Dead has a decent, and simple, idea at the heart of it. A group of relatively young and carefree people play around with a home-made ouija set-up (using an upturned glass and letters written on pieces of paper) and unleash something supernatural and dangerous. The problems start with the mix of annoying characters, but things get worse when the writers, and it took about four people to write this thing, decide to complicate their story by making the leads suspect that the killer entity could be a djinn.
Joe Absolom, Marsha Thomason, Lara Belmont, Melanie Gutteridge, James Hillier, Alec Newman, Lukas Haas, and Mel Raido make up the core group, with Absolom, looking to move from TV into movies, given what feels like the central role, but jostling alongside Thomason and Newman as the film-makers shift focus and spend the runtime turning what should have been a lean and entertaining horror into something that feels baggy and loose, and occasionally even laughable.
I am not going to name all of the writers, none of them have the biggest filmographies worth exploring, but the script certainly feels like too many chefs spoiling the broth. There are a couple of great moments - one highlight, although it may not sound as good written down here, shows the exterior of a house where some lights are being turned on by someone fearing for their life, only to see them being turned off again - but they are very few and far between. And even when the script is working well, the dark visuals can make it hard to enjoy what should be a nice bit of tension.
There’s one great death scene, as entertaining as it is preposterous and illogical, but everything becomes tiresome by the time the third act starts to play out. Revelations don’t feel surprising, repeated sequences of characters being stalked just become boring, and there’s nobody who feels worth really rooting for.
Is it unwatchably awful? No. It’s just not worth your time. It clocks in at just over the 90-minute mark, which is a plus, but it feels like it runs longer than that. I still like that central idea though. Someone should take it, strip away all the fat, work with a better visual palette, and give us a much better end result.
3/10
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