Main cast: Chris Leary (Rustin), Tiana Tuttle (Melanie), Houston Stevenson (Brandon), Emily Sweet (Wendy), John Littlefield (Hershel), and Aimee Stolte (Gemma)
Director: Dante Yore
No, before you ask: yes, the movie is called Fear PHarm, but it has nothing to do with Pfizer or anything of that sort, alright.
Sure, there is some evil pharmaceutical stuff in here, but that’s the twist that the movie cheerfully spoils with the title itself—a round of applause to everyone behind this great move. At any rate, don’t worry, there is nothing here that will remind folks of the Shanghai shivers of all variants and the mandates that come with the poke-pokes.
The movie starts with a naked young lady fleeing through what seems like a corn field. Oh no, is she being pursued by those Democrats recently polled to be in favor of instituting gulags for people that dare to refuse the wu-flu poke-poke, for daring to do just that?
No. This movie is about four people join other people in wandering into a corn field maze for Halloween—I suppose they really have nothing better to do. This “Fear Pharm” is like a haunted house and people in it will be hunted down by various killers in masks and costumes. Melanie is their 10,000th “customer”, so yay, she and her friends can go into “VIP Maze” to win $5,000 if they could come out in under two hours, $10,000 in under one hour.
Predictably enough, when people get killed in the VIP Maze, they get killed off for real.
Oh, and sadly, after the opening scene with that naked lady running around and finally killed, there is no more nudity here; perhaps the folks behind this movie ran out of money to convince another cast member to run naked.
This movie is very meta and self-referential. For example, the family of killers mock their “clients” and claim that they are just giving these clients the realest horror experience possible, and each member fits an archetype to a tee. Characters point out common tropes like exposition dump passed off as conversations and tell those folks about to launch into such a dump to zip it. The main characters describe themselves in a very meta manner, like Rustin calling himself a generic white guy. On and on, they go, and the whole thing is pretty amusing for 20 minutes or so.
Unfortunately, once these folks are in the maze, the movie pretty much stops dead. Things become lethally dull as folks just wander around in the maze, and the villains either come and go or brutalize these folks seemingly at random. Really, way too much time is wasted on people wandering around the corn, and I start to wonder whether these people were promised $5,000 if they could pad the movie up to two hours or something, only to run out of ideas on how to do this.
The movie comes up to about 76 minutes, but by the time it ends, I have lost all enthusiasm for this thing. It never really recovers from its momentum completely stalling once the maze part begins, and the whole thing ends up being one big wasted opportunity.
Oh, and barring one pretty gory, but sadly short, scene, the death scenes here aren’t very memorable.
Maybe with a better budget this movie would have been better put together, but still, the end result resembles something that tries very hard to be meta and quirky in order to compensate for its shortcomings. There’s only so much self-aware humor can do when the shortcomings make things dull and draggy, though.
