Prison of the Dead (2000)

 

Four former high school friends - Kristof, Michele, Allie, and Rory - travel to a funeral at the remote Hawthorne Funeral Home, built atop the old Blood Prison: a brutal jail built by Puritan extremists specifically for the torture and execution of "witches and heretics".

The funeral is for their friend Calvin, who was part of their high school circle.  All five members of the group were once amateur Paranormal Investigators, but have since found other interests.

Soon after their arrival, Calvin reveals himself to actually be alive. He faked his death on Kristof’s behalf, as the only surefire way to get the others to come.  Why was this gathering so important?  Well, Kristof‘s father - a confirmed sceptic of the supernatural - recently bought the Funeral Home and set up a contest: $1 million to anyone who can prove the existence of a reputed supernatural artefact known as the Talon Key.

Kristof intends to win the contest before it begins. Not for the money, which he instead offers as inducement to the others, but because he has daddy issues that he needs to resolve. 

Although annoyed at being duped, the others now have one million reasons to stick around and go along with Kristof's plan.  Of course, the problem with trying to prove that the supernatural is real, is that you might find the demonstration of that proof quite unpleasant ...

Let's start with the headline item: this is not a very hood movie, and I can't honestly recommend you spend your time on it.

The biggest problem?  It's a 70 minute film and pretty much nothing happens until around minute 40.  That's criminally slow pacing in such a lean run time.  Mind you, even when things do happen, it's mostly just possessed people sitting there calmly and quietly while zombies kill them.  Which is not as exciting as the film makers presumably thought.

"Not exciting" is unfortunately a theme of the film.  The end's a complete cop-out: one character basically pulls out a "stop all this supernatural nonsense" magic doodad, and the film stops.

Speaking of cop-outs: the movie uses the old "mucking about with a ouija board turns real" schtick, which is a bit like claiming that playing Monopoly will turn you into a real property baron.  And having the script acknowledge that ouija boards are just party games - as is done here - does not excuse using one in your séance scene.

So are there any pluses to the film?  Well, I'll give it credit for being unusually LGBTQ positive.  Bisexual male representation is a rare thing in movies in general, even today.  To see all three of the "main" male characters in this - a 20+ year old horror film - be presented as less than 100% straight is quite notable.  Even more so when you consider that two of them are pretty openly acknowledged as (former?) lovers.

I also quite liked the motivation the film eventually ascribes to the murderous zombies.   It's more complex than the usual "killing things is just what zombies do" paradigm.  There's even the potential for a good quandary in it.  This is not the movie to deliver on that potential, though.