Colleen (Claudia Lee) is a young woman who is being pestered by somebody leaving photographs at her grocery store which seem to depict images of dead girls but without being able to prove that they are dead and with no body count to speak of the local sheriff is unwilling to take action. Meanwhile in Los Angeles photographer and former Spearfish, South Dakota, resident Peter Hemmings (Kal Penn) is reading about the ongoing trend of the ‘Dead Model’ look, which he believes could give him a lucrative edge in the industry so he decides to head back to Spearfish to find out more with his assistant and entourage in tow.

When they bump into Colleen and Peter realises she is receiving the photographs he has seen online he decides to invite her to his holiday house for a party he is throwing which causes friction with her stifling boyfriend Ben (Toby Hemingway) but she decides to go anyway and finds herself warming to Peter’s assistant Chris (Kenny Wormald), when Peter offers her a job as a model she decides to throw off her small town shackles, chase fame and fortune and joins Peters group in his house for their final night before they head back to California but that is when Colleens stalker steps up the stakes.

Horror genius Wes Craven is listed as a producer on this film so with a beginning echoing back to the start of the original Scream movie, albeit not as dramatically and you can see his influences all through this movie, from the naive small town sheriff, through the stalker feel of the killer interactions with the main character and the clever use of camera work to show us hints of what is to come, whether we realise it or not but unfortunately all these elements are done to a lesser standard so his name that seems to be as far as the influence went as the other fascets of the movie just feel all over the place and it felt like the continuity was all wrong so perhaps some pieces were left on the cutting room floor that possibly should have stayed in.

I don’t normally talk specifics in movies but there are two particular moments in the movie, which won’t spoil it, that I noticed as being particularly bad and feel the need to point out as, unless I missed something they make no sense and add to my point above. One is when Chris first meets Coleen in the store and calls her by name, now while it is possible that he spotted her name tag she never reacts to the fact that this stranger calls her by name. Coincidence, maybe? But given this girl feels like she is being stalked I’d have expected some reaction to the event . The second is a text conversation where Coleen is texting a friend but the person on the other end is not who she thinks tit is and during the conversation Coleen mentions the party and meeting up to go, to which the reply comes that ‘I’ll see you there’ or something to that effect but Colleen never mentioned a time or place for the party that I spotted.

The plot and most of the acting are awful and the characters are all throw away, even the main ones. There was no sense of empathy towards Colleen as she didn’t seem to show any over concern for her missing friends and her reactions were very emotionless all through the movie, even Kal Penn couldn’t save some face and seemed to be phoning it in as the sarcastic photographer. I hope his stuff was ad-libbed as it certainly felt that way. Save for the excellent cinematography by Dean Cundey who brought all his experience from his work on the original Halloween and The Fog to liven this disaster up and a couple of good death scenes, which I would expect anyway in a horror film this is not good and unless you are really a die-hard fan of the genre I would recommend you give this one a miss.

DJ Speaks Rating: 3.5 Out Of 10