Fade to Black

I remember being a kid, standing in the horror section of the local video rental place, looking for something to rent. This movie's box art always caught my attention, but I never rented it. I tended to stick to the big names of horror back then: Jason, Freddy, Michael, etc. But this art stuck with me, and when I saw it was available on Shudder, I was happy to have my chance to finally see it. That box art is the best thing about this movie. A nerdy outcast who lives with his abusive aunt and is obsessed with film and is surrounded by jerks snaps one day and kills people while dressed up as movie characters. It could be a fun premise for a movie. There's a lot of ways it could be taken, and this movie fails to do anything fun with it. In fact, on a few occasions, it does the DUMBEST things with it. It starts with the protagonist, Eric Binford, who is also the antagonist. He's bullied at work by co-workers and his boss, his aunt (really his mom, but that's a secret that's dropped in later as a throwaway line) is domineering, and he's so awkward even hookers dismiss him. It's a perfect set-up to feel sad for the guy ... except he becomes a killer. This strips away any sympathy we have for him, but the movie doesn't transfer said sympathy to anybody else. His boss is still a dick. His co-workers are still jerks. His mother is still abrasive. Who am I supposed to be rooting for here? Never mind the fact that he goes from wallflower to serial killer literally on a whim. Over the first half an hour of establishing his character, not once are we given even the most remote of hints that his sanity is on a razor's edge. He just seems like a huge movie nerd, he gets in a fight with his aunt, and suddenly, he pushes her down a flight of stairs. It's like the movie suddenly realized the plot wasn't going to unfold itself and jump-started things in the most out-of-nowhere gear shift possible. And the whole conceit about using the movies never plays into his kills in any way. He dresses up as a mummy ... and his boss dies of a heart attack. His abusive jerk co-worker argued about a bet over some Casablanca trivia ... so he shoots the co-worker dressed as Hopalong Cassidy. He dressed up as Dracula to see Night Of The Living Dead at the movies (umm, what?), re-enacts the shower scene from Psycho with an aspiring actress he has a crush on that looks like Marilyn Monroe with the intention of getting her autograph STILL DRESSED AS DRAUCLA (umm, what?!?), and then chases a hooker who brushed him off through the streets until she falls and impales herself on a fence post. All the while, the movie cuts to clips from other movies, I guess to reinforce Eric's love of movies, but the clips almost never reference his kills. The one time it lines up -- Dracula -- they show a clip from the Christopher Lee version, even though Eric is dressed up like the Bela Lugosi version. That's not even getting into the pointless sub-plot(s) with the criminal psychologist, or the guy who sleazes on the Marilyn lookalike, or the movie producer that's introduced with less than a half hour to go so the body count can have one more victim, or the aforementioned aunt being his mom ... and kills that are boring, uninspired, and executed with all the flair of an after-school special. It's a fundamentally boring movie with a squandered premise. Besides a striking poster, it has nothing else to offer.