By Al Kratina
March 19, 2008 - 19:27
The Lost
2005, USA
Directed by: Chris Sivertson
Written by: Jack Ketchum (novel), Chris Sivertson
Producers: Lucky McKee, Mike McKee, Shelli Merrill, Chris Sivertson
Starring: Marc Senter, Shay Astar, Alex Frost, Megan Henning
Genre: Drama
Rating: 18A
DVD Distributor: Anchor Bay/Starz Home Entertainment
Website: http://www.thelostmovie.net/
Running Time: 119 minutes
The future of horror has been here for a while. It’s not Japanese films about ghostly kids with hair like underage Type O Negative groupies, and it isn’t Clive Barker dressing a Steven King novel as a court jester. It’s author Jack Ketchum, sitting quietly in his basement, pulling the eyelids off a prostitute to make sure he gets the word-picture right in his latest book.
An important caveat: The rest of this review will be written as if Sivertson had not directed last year’s Lindsay Lohan debacle I Know Who Killed Me. Because The Lost, though it slows in the middle and suffers from the occasionally tremulous performance, shows a strong grounding in visceral horror and a nascent sense of experimentation. The film stars Marc Senter as Ray Pye, a young sociopath who kills two girls at a campground on the same sort of whim that might send me to the corner store to buy Doritos. Four years later, he’s still free, but the swirling psychosis within is making him twitchy, like a meth cook near a boiling pot of ammonia.
Rating: 7 /10