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Released by: Kino Lorber
Released on: August 7, 2012.
Director: David Lee Madison
Cast: Stephen Geoffreys, Edward X. Young, Brad Loree
Year: 2011
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The Movie:
It's enough to make you cry...
In 1977 Roger Watkins made a grimy and highly effective horror film called THE FUNHOUSE (aka "THE CUCKOO CLOCKS OF HELL") for somewhere between 1 and 2 thousand dollars. Why do I mention this and what does it have to do with MR. HUSH? Simply this - the next time someone suggests that a film needs to be judged by lower standards simply because it is "low budget", "made by REAL horror fans" or my personal favorite "anybody that makes a movie deserves credit because its so darn hard to do" point them at Watkin's film.
And then make 'em watch MR. HUSH.
HUSH is a wannabe slasher film shot on the cheap (by today's standards) starring Brad Loree as doting dad Holland Price. Price has a sad back story - his family was wiped out by a serial killer on Halloween 1990. Now it is 2000 and we are spending the first interminable minutes of this film with Price, his annoying wife and too-cute young daughter. Dear old daddy is helping his kid carve the pumpkin while smooching his wife and making doe eyes at her. Right off the bat we encounter two crippling problems with the film. One is the utterly atrocious acting. This is serious high school level play stuff folks - flat delivery, overextended pauses and the kind of overly mannered gestures that you see in rank amateurs. Then there is the script and the pacing. Price tells his wife in about 10 different ways how much he loves her and she responds about how wonderful a man he is and how perfect their marriage his. It's all meant to show just how lovely their life together is. Problem is that it drags like hell and the dialog is atrocious. We could have gotten this message in 2 minutes or less with a decent script.Then Mr. Hush (Edward X. Young) rings the doorbell posing as a priest (replete with crap fake Irish accent) whose car broke down with a busload of schoolkids. He asks to use the phone but then goes psycho and kills Price's wife by slashing her throat (in one of the film's only decently executed bits). Price manages to make it upstairs to find his daughter gone.
Price then spends the next ten years hunting for his missing daughter eventually landing in the small town in PA where he started in 2000. After getting involved with a waitress at his job (who of course has a daughter) events begin to repeat themselves after a return visit from Mr. Hush who now has a henchman (Stephen Geoffreys of FRIGHT NIGHT fame). The whole mystery of who Mr. Hush is and why he keeps tormenting Price is pretty easy to figure out but the filmmakers seem to want to play it out as some big mystery. The other other deficiency is Young's dialog and delivery. His wild overacting and terrible one-liners mark him as a third rate Freddy Krueger. But unlike Freddy he just doesn't know when to shut up and blathers on and on. As for Geoffreys, it's good to see him again onscreen and his performance is the only decent one in the film, but he has nothing to do and is wasted.
Of note also is Price's hair - yes his hair. His hideous and distracting shaggy dog bangs make it almost impossible to focus on anything else on screen in any scene he's in (which is most of them). And his repeated obscenities yelled at Hush in various scenes are quite comedic. At one point Price is chained up in a basement and his lines are just some variation on the same 3 obscene statements over and over. It is spectacularly dumb and lazy writing.
Video/Audio/Extras:
MR. HUSH was shot like a bad soap opera so Kino's 2.20:1 1920x 1080P transfer really brings out the flat and erratic appearance of the source material. That said the Blu looks faithful to the way this mess was shot.
The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 is an awful mix with distortion (due to the large amount of screaming from certain actors) frequently appearing. I don't think this is the fault of the encode however but related to the track being poorly recorded at the source level.
A boring commentary track with Director/Writer/Producer David Lee Madison and the actor that plays Mr. Hush (Edward X. Young) is included. There is also a pointless blooper reel, couple of film trailers and a video intro to the film by the director and actor Brian O'Halloran (who has a small part in the movie). Finally you get a music video for the "Mr. Hush" theme song from some band called Visitor which words cannot describe.
The Final Word:
Avoid at all costs.
