A perennial favorite film genre is the horror flick. Since the primary target audience consist of high school and college boys this type of film frequently proliferates in the summer months. School is out and guys like spending a lazy summer evening hoping for bloodshed, gore and a good fright. Not only do these films make a strong appearance in the local Cineplex many independent film makers find a distributor for the DVD market. The down side of this if you tend to watch a lot of movies is all the horror flicks seem to blur together after awhile. Horror was once a psychological endeavor slowing allowing the terror to build in the minds of the audience. Lately horror movies made here in the States the tendency is to go for the quick, cheap visceral scare. It doesn’t take a lot to make one of these ‘slash’ and dash' flicks. All that is needed is a remote location, a couple hundred gallons of stage blood, a bucket or two of phony entrails and at least one buxomly young lady with no sense of modesty. Then rent a digital camera and poof, you’re a film maker. Fortunately, there are some writers and directors who have not given up on the more traditional view of the genre. They still try to create a horror movie with some semblance of a plot instead a relying only on special effects. One movie in that vein
(no pun intended) is ‘Albino Farm’ by Joe Anderson and Sean McEwen. Right up front it should be noted there are some flaws in the presentation. Many of the script elements are hackney and predicable but what helps to carry the film is the feeling that all involved gave it their honest best effort and that goes a long way. This is a cast and crew relatively new to film and as such is on a learning curve. If they keep moving forward from here they will make quite a name for themselves.

The team of Joe Anderson and Sean McEwen shared the credit for both the screenplay and the direction of this movie. Anderson has some prior work in production while McEwen has been building some scting credits; both of these young men are just starting out in writing and direction. It is to be expected that under these circumstances they would make mistakes and technical errors, what matters most here is giving it a try to diverge from the lamentable direction the genre has been going. The story opens up in the near deserted town of Shiloh. Two boys are on their bikes and in a touch of true Americana one has an old playing card in the spokes of the bike’s wheel. The cinematographer, René Jung tries to be creative in these opening shots by pushing the contrast and muting the color palette to give a somewhat surreal look surround by a touch of a glow. They arrive at an abandon property closed off with a rusty fence. The older boy squeezes and taunts the younger one suddenly something moves in and both boys are gone.

The scene shifts to the current time frame of the story, four college kids are in a car ostensibly working on a school assignment to create a video log of rural America. This is where déjà vu starts kicking in for the audience. The kids as over used stereotypes; the sensible brunette, Stacey (Tammin Sursok) who is driving, the wildly dressed blonde Melody (Alicia Lagano), painting her nails, Brian (Nick Richey) holding the camera trying to get a shot down Melody’s top and finally for a touch of ethnic diversity, Sanjay (Sunkrish Bala). The writers do set up the requisite isolation well addressing the usual plot point questions. There are no bars for the cell phone and Brian ditched the spare tire in favor of the beer cooler. These kids are in the running of the Darwin awards. Since they are in the Ozark Mountains they are required to run across someone with a congenital deformity and in this case it happens with a legless hillbilly scraping up s very flat road kill; less than seven minutes into the story. Naturally the four run afoul of an old, terrible folk legend about a band of killer albinos.

The film was designed with a slow pace which is a refreshing change from the music video hyper kinetic faire that has become standard. The down side is this approach is currently beyond the level of the directors. They are certainly on the right track but the flick needs more polish. For a film to take its time building suspense the director has to employ some hook to grab the audience followed by sufficient character development to continue to engage the viewer. I just found myself not overly concerned with the plight of the students; there was nothing to help personalize the story. Anderson a McEwen are making a good start by avoiding an over dependency on bloodshed and special effects but there is work ahead in telling the story.