[HorrorScience] Dark Feed (2013)

Reading time: 7 minutes

Qualification

Dark Feed

Year

2013

Duration

86 minutes

Director

Michael and Shawn Rasmussen

Distribution

Andrew Rudick, Victoria Nugent, Evalena Marie, Michael Scott Allen, Jason Beaubien, Michael Reed, Dayna Cousins, Jonathan Thompson, Rebecca Whitehurst

Script

Michael and Shawn Rasmussen

»What do you think if we make a low-budget horror film with unknown actors, playing unknown actors filming a low-budget horror film?» The Rasmussen brothers could have asked a Hollywood producer about this and most likely they would end up finding one willing to pay for that idea. In the case of the tape I'm discussing here, they were even luckier: they produced the film with their own production company, Rasmussen Brothers Productions.

Of course, a production company actually depends on the money they get from private investors, who hope to put in a certain amount of capital and then receive a higher value thanks to the profits from the film. I believe that in this case the Rasmussens had no problems getting the money, although they may have had problems when returning it including profits. And of course, they have been scriptwriters of The Ward, which was directed by one of the masters of horror, John Carpenter, will have had a lot to do with the ease of obtaining investors for this production.

Dark Feed It is about the members of a complete film crew, which includes the director, actors, cameramen, special effects manager, sound engineer and more people in charge of different tasks, who are filming a low-budget horror film in an abandoned psychiatric hospital.

The film focuses on two characters: Chris (Andrew Rudick), the scriptwriter of the fake movie, who was invited to the filming set and who never manages to find his place and feel comfortable, and Beth (Victoria Nugent), the mistreated multitasking employee, who is generally in charge of moving things from one room to another when asked, looking for someone when they get lost, or connecting and disconnecting devices.

From the beginning of the film we will see that something is wrong in that place. The hospital seems to have a life of its own, and the walls are gradually turning black. Additionally, a black liquid drips from various areas. And not only that, but there seem to be some supernatural creatures living there. Everything is related to the past of that place, in which a doctor performed experiments on several psychiatric patients, forcing them to drink a black liquid with unknown effects. That same doctor committed suicide in that hospital, but not before having murdered his wife and daughter, drowning them in one of the pools he used for his experiments.

The building also seems to have a certain negative influence on some of the people who are there, and apparently the air they have been breathing for days is causing them to begin to behave in a confusing and even violent way. Everything gets worse, and many of the characters begin to disappear, being killed by a mysterious woman who we don't know what she is doing there or by other characters.

[HorrorScience] Dark Feed (2013) — Beth discovering a little about the building's past

Dark Feed It is a film with a lot of potential that the directors seem not to have wanted to take advantage of. Just because the fake movie that is being filmed within the real movie is low-budget and has bad actors does not mean that these same actors have to act badly within the main movie. However they do it, and some interpretations are horrible and very unbelievable. To this we must add several flaws in the script, things without explanation or reason, errors in direction, and a very large but undeveloped group of characters, which we end up caring very little about, including a couple that suddenly appear as if they had always been there but that we had not seen until now.

Many of the things the characters do in this movie make no sense. It is not known when they are filming and when they are not, it is not understood the structure of the building or why they are all so dispersed, or what is the reason for them to be in one part and then appear in another and after a while return to where they were at the beginning. We also don't know anything about a male silhouette that we see out of focus in an elevator, or a woman coming out of a tank of black water, and their presence will not be explained to us at any time, even becoming abandoned resources during the course of the film. It is as if the brother directors and screenwriters had not really known what to do with the story, and had decided on the fly, with the consequence of having included elements that would later have no place.

The reviews that this film has received have been mixed, although in general the vast majority of media have rated it Dark Feed like a mediocre movie. Some of the reasons most cited as causes of its low rating are the same ones that I have mentioned, but I would like to defend this film from certain critics who have disqualified it for not having scenes. gore, that is, excessively bloody scenes. These criticisms refer to some scenes in the film in which when something is about to happen, a scene cut causes the camera to focus elsewhere and although we can still know what is happening, we are not seeing the violent act in the foreground. Personally I think that these criticisms are absurd, and that any follower of the genre will agree with me that the scenes gore They are necessary in films that use this resource as the main element to generate fear or disgust, but they are optional in all other cases. In any case, the inclusion of scenes gore In this movie they would not have saved her from what she is: a poorly developed, poorly acted, and poorly directed story.

Three curious facts about Dark Feed:

In a scene where 3 people are playing basketball you can see that the ball has several areas covered with black adhesive tape, clearly to cover the mark. Not only does it look bad, it's ridiculous.
In it official facebook Dark Feed They were putting links to different positive reviews about the film. The strange thing is that they put a link to a blog in Spanish, without understanding what the review says except part of its title: that the movie makes you say WTF (what the fuck, or its equivalent in Spanish "what the hell"). You may have thought that this was a good thing, but the review qualifies the film as bad, and not only that, but at the end it has the link to watch the film online, which is clearly a violation of copyright and reason enough not to be named by the film's official Facebook account.
Some trailers for the film indicate 2012 as the release year. IMDB marked 2011. Dark Feed It was officially launched on March 18, 2013.