Long Time Dead opens to a caption that informs us that we're in 'Morocco 1979' where a group of people are holding a séance which gets out of hand when a fire demon called a Djinn appears & supposedly kills everyone... Long Time Dead then cuts to present day London where four house-mates, Rob (Joe Absolom), Liam (Alex Newman), Webster (Lukas Haas) & Stella (Lara Belmont) are planning to go out for the night. They hook up with their soon to be new house-mate the drug dealing Joe (Mel Raido) & three friends, Lucy (Marsha Thomason), Spencer (James Hillier) & Liam's girlfriend Annie (Melanie Gutteridge). While sitting around at a club they begin to have a discussion on what the biggest buzz in life is, from this rather innocent sounding topic the subject of séance's is brought up & for some reason they all decide to hold one. They find a suitable venue which appears to be in attic space above the club & begin, unfortunately they release the fire demon Djinn which spells the words 'ALL DIE' out on the Ouija board which freaks them all out, as it would I suppose. Shortly after Annie dies in an accident & her body has burns on it, the remaining member's of the group feel something is wrong & do some research which leads to some unexpected answers & the discovery that maybe not everyone is as they appear or who they claim. As more of the friends continue to die in accidents a way must be found to send the evil Djinn back before it completes it's mission to kill all those who summoned it...
Directed Adam Marcus I thought that this English & French co-production was a somewhat modest & undemanding way to pass 90 odd minutes. The script by Eitan Arrusi, Chris Baker, Daniel Bronzite & Andy Day really isn't anything special & I can't quite believe it took four writers to come up with this. Generally speaking Long Time Dead is rather slow & uneventful & the characters are so bland & similar with most of them looking & sounding exactly the same & the only one's I could really distinguish between are Lucy because she's black & Joe because of his hair! Everyone else barely registered with me & that made it very hard to care about anyone or anything, oh & they're an unlikeable bunch of teenage stereotypes as well which didn't help the film. The script also features various lapses of logic, at the end I just couldn't stop thinking that it was a bit of a coincidence that a bunch of kids would just happen to hold a séance & summon the exact same demon that their landlord & one of their Father's did years earlier, a fact which they only discover later on in the film. There is another scene in particular I keep thinking about that sums Long Time Dead & it's silly script up, when two people break into a police guarded house & turn the lights on only for the police officer on guard to be conveniently looking in the opposite direction & only looking back at the house literally seconds after the lights have been turned off. I also hated the scare tactic's that director Marcus employed, I mean people hearing noises only to have one of their 'friends' grab their shoulder & apologise for scaring them. What do these people think will happen exactly? Can't they just call out & say who it is that's creeping around in the shadows? Long Time Dead uses this clichéd & lazy technique on a number of increasingly annoying occasions. There are also plenty of cheap demon point-of-view shots which presumably help save money by not having to show the demon itself. On the positive side it tells it's story well enough I suppose & while it's not exceptional Long Time Dead is a well made film generally speaking. I also liked the ending where the Djinn appears to win, it's nice not to have a happy sugar coated ending for a change. Long Time Dead is one of those horror films that has nothing really wrong with it & entertains to a certain extent but suffers by being just so average a few script problems that should have been ironed out especially since four people worked on the thing. The gore quotient is sadly lacking with nothing more graphic than a few splashes of blood & someone being burnt. As for the Djinn itself the best the filmmakers could come up with are some CGI demon eyes on an ordinary actor. There's no sex or nudity either but there is some swearing & drug usage which the film treats lightly & doesn't say is right but neither does it say it is wrong just that it's a normal teenage thing to do. Overall I thought Long Time Dead was a slightly below average horror that didn't do much for me but at the same time I have seen much worse & at least it kept me watching until the end. Don't spend any sort of money on it but if you can catch it on TV for free & there's nothing else on then it's probably just about worth an hour & a half of your time, but only just.
Directed Adam Marcus I thought that this English & French co-production was a somewhat modest & undemanding way to pass 90 odd minutes. The script by Eitan Arrusi, Chris Baker, Daniel Bronzite & Andy Day really isn't anything special & I can't quite believe it took four writers to come up with this. Generally speaking Long Time Dead is rather slow & uneventful & the characters are so bland & similar with most of them looking & sounding exactly the same & the only one's I could really distinguish between are Lucy because she's black & Joe because of his hair! Everyone else barely registered with me & that made it very hard to care about anyone or anything, oh & they're an unlikeable bunch of teenage stereotypes as well which didn't help the film. The script also features various lapses of logic, at the end I just couldn't stop thinking that it was a bit of a coincidence that a bunch of kids would just happen to hold a séance & summon the exact same demon that their landlord & one of their Father's did years earlier, a fact which they only discover later on in the film. There is another scene in particular I keep thinking about that sums Long Time Dead & it's silly script up, when two people break into a police guarded house & turn the lights on only for the police officer on guard to be conveniently looking in the opposite direction & only looking back at the house literally seconds after the lights have been turned off. I also hated the scare tactic's that director Marcus employed, I mean people hearing noises only to have one of their 'friends' grab their shoulder & apologise for scaring them. What do these people think will happen exactly? Can't they just call out & say who it is that's creeping around in the shadows? Long Time Dead uses this clichéd & lazy technique on a number of increasingly annoying occasions. There are also plenty of cheap demon point-of-view shots which presumably help save money by not having to show the demon itself. On the positive side it tells it's story well enough I suppose & while it's not exceptional Long Time Dead is a well made film generally speaking. I also liked the ending where the Djinn appears to win, it's nice not to have a happy sugar coated ending for a change. Long Time Dead is one of those horror films that has nothing really wrong with it & entertains to a certain extent but suffers by being just so average a few script problems that should have been ironed out especially since four people worked on the thing. The gore quotient is sadly lacking with nothing more graphic than a few splashes of blood & someone being burnt. As for the Djinn itself the best the filmmakers could come up with are some CGI demon eyes on an ordinary actor. There's no sex or nudity either but there is some swearing & drug usage which the film treats lightly & doesn't say is right but neither does it say it is wrong just that it's a normal teenage thing to do. Overall I thought Long Time Dead was a slightly below average horror that didn't do much for me but at the same time I have seen much worse & at least it kept me watching until the end. Don't spend any sort of money on it but if you can catch it on TV for free & there's nothing else on then it's probably just about worth an hour & a half of your time, but only just.