Wonderfully offbeat film!

Absolutely amazing

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

This movie isn't really very good. It starts out good, but goes downhill within about twenty minutes. Dee Wallace is in it, which is what drew me to the movie. The story starts as a young man, Alex, who has well above cognitive level and intelligence.Frankly, the film doesn't make a whole lot of sense in less than a half hour. If you have a free afternoon, watching this on cable might be OK, but don't waste your money purchasing this. If someone who has seen this could explain the final scene with Alex and his final doctor, Olivia Hussey, I would love to hear it. Again, that was another scene that had absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the film.

Prologue: Sean Young goes absolutely nuts (art imitating real life) which quickly lands her in trouble with her husband who has very little understanding for wives who suddenly start acting like blood-sucking vampires. Later on, their two sons are auctioned off to the highest foster-home bidder by their father. He senses that they aren't quite normal. Yes, one of them even wears nail-polish 15 years later. Dad was right. Weg mit dir!The beginning credits start, and then they finally end. First scene: a brilliant chess player is making money by beating everyone in sight, first an Oriental with pink nail-polish, and then Alex with black nail- polish. You can say what you want about this muddled TV/straight-to- video movie, but you can't say it isn't original: two gay guys with nail-polish playing chess one after another is a cinematic novelty. This had never been featured in any movie before.From here HP plods on, without much rhyme or reason. And yet Alex's nail-polish still doesn't wear off.To be frank, at this point (around the middle) I had to go out and get a hamburger, so I missed around 15 minutes. A mind-shattering loss to what would have been a far richer life for me, to be sure, but somehow I managed to recover from this major blow and bravely ploughed on. I just wish the movie had ploughed on as well, but it didn't. It still just plodded along. And Alex's nail-polish still wouldn't wear off.Suffice it to say Alex suffers from a mysterious condition called "increasing IQitis". This means that his intelligence grows so quickly that he can literally feel his "brain getting bigger". Sort of the opposite of what has been happening to Sean Penn since his birth.So amazingly smart is Alex supposed to be, and yet who does he go to consult? A Catholic priest. How very wise a decision. The priest gives him a Bible and tells him to pray: just the kind of advice I'd give to a stark-raving madman with a 545 IQ.The priest is played by none other than Udo Kier himself. Udo "They- hire-me-for-weird-short-roles/cameos-in-mostly rather-bad-B-movies" Kier. Udo "They-must like-my-supposedly-weird-face/persona" Kier. Kier is about as unique as an abortion sub-plot in a U.S. TV soaper. Not exactly the Second Coming of Klaus Kinski, I'm afraid…Apparently, there are not enough Catholic priests in New York (which has a sizable Italian and Latino population) so that the city has to import German ones. Udo's thick accent leads one to suggest that he'd gotten off the boat just a day earlier. Either that, or he uses the same spiffing vocal coach that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been employing (I'm not making this up). Udo loses face by appearing in this movie – if that's possible. And then he literally loses his face when a demon tears him into tiny beats.Yes, a pig-faced demon.At the end, everything ends on a tragic note, which was to be expected. Perpetually unlucky Alex arrives only minutes after his long-lost brother (older or younger? Sorry, wasn't paying that much attention, hamburger and everything…) blows his brains with a pistol. These two had last seen each other when they were around 12 and 9 respectively, and yet somehow neither had managed to recognize the other. Silly.In the last scene, Alex is tied to a bed in a lunatic asylum, while Olivia Hussey transforms into another one of those pig-nosed demons. What a cop-out ending.There was also some rather quickly/vaguely mentioned stuff about secret Soviet experiments regarding metaphysical phenomena. But the nail-polish STILL didn't wear off. Perhaps they should have just stuck Alex into your typical nu-metal boy-band and never turned this messy script into a movie

This isn't a horror movie, really, more like a thriller. You are wondering all the time what is going on as the plot expands in several directions. But in the end, something obscure happens, nothing makes any sense, the characters that expanded the plot start dying due to latex monsters and the ending is pathetic.It is just another example of a movie starting well and ending disastrously. I mean, there was some gore, but without any need for it. It had a complex plot, but then it just slimmed abruptly when people started dying. There is some mystery, but it is never explained. There is no conclusion or real point of the entire story.Bottom line: a failure on almost every level and that , ironically, because it started well on so many levels.

An impressive cast headlines a very elusive, mind-boggling psychological thriller about a deeply mentally troubled young man, Alex(Christopher Denham)who believes beasts are killing anyone he comes in direct physical contact with. His intellect is growing as he gains other abilities such as his unique ability to see things that happen to other people. He can simply skim through a book, for an example, and know every word by memory. He has knowledge of things such as chess which confound him. It seems all this started when he met a talented chess player in Central Park named Harry(Erick Kastel). He tries to confide with others around him about what is happening(..and the beast that almost kills him in his closet)such as a psychologist named Dr. Karen Murphy(the still very beautiful Olivia Hussey of ROMEO & JULIET and BLACK Christmas fame)trying to help him and two friends who he has peeped on during having sex. Karen sends Alex to a once-respected doctor,(Mark Margolis) blacklisted for proclaiming outlandish things their field found too wild and unbelievable to stand behind. Boris, who had seen "links" like Alex in Moscow, informs him that he sees what others don't..these beasts can use links to the outside world because of a certain part of the brain only certain humans can use. Alex tries going to a priest,(played by Udo Kier!)for solace and even there in the church during their meeting the beast shows itself. A doctor, Ira Gold(William Atherton)wished to examine Alex at the start of the film when he fell unconscious(..he seems quite healthy except for his exceptionally high Attention Deficit Disorder)and is killed by what appears to be a monster. Two chess players who Alex met at the park near Harry also are killed in a public bathroom from what appeared to be a monster.At the beginning, we see two young boys experiencing a birthday party where their mother(Sean Young)bleeds from the nose. Later, we see a seemingly possessed mother with evil eyes and a nasty growl on the prowl for her family. The father(Larry Fessenden, the director of WENDIGO and the vampire flick HABIT)has to defend himself and shoots her with his shotgun. He later sends the boys off to foster care insisting that they are separated. This may very well be why the strange occurrences start happening when Alex meets Harry, as we later discover that the two are more "linked" than they realize.All this I have mentioned above could be part of a warped, disturbed mind. The very opening shows blood trickling down Alex's legs as his hair appears in a frizzy frenzy. This could signify that he himself was committing all the murders instead of the beasts. I'm not quite sure, however, because the film won't give us a definite answer. The ending leaves you wondering what the hell is going on. I'm afraid the narrative becomes so chaotic, I was wondering if the madness we see is purposed to create doubt in our minds regarding Alex's sanity or that he just sees what others without his gifts don't.Dee Wallace has a small role as a doctor attending to Alex's physical condition. I will say that this flick is quite the mindscrew.