This video was brought to us by Damned Productions. They should have changed their name to, “When In The Hell Is This Damned Thing Gonna Be Over With? Productions.” “The Angel of Death” is 117 minutes long. 117 minutes! Not enough happens in this sucker to fill up seventeen minutes, let alone 117! Let’s take a quick scan through my notes by way of reviewing Dave Lauder’s torpid affair, shall we? From the top: “Every shot and/or sequence is at least half again as long as it needs to be…as ponderous as it is impenetrable…looked like a low-rez Avid copy. Could have saved memory by trimming the running time…what the f___ is going on in this movie?!”
And so forth. Do we detect a theme yet?
Here’s all I gleaned from these two lost hours of my life: Kelly (Rika Daniels), a computer programmer for Global Tech, confesses to her aspiring actress friend Ruth (Monique Taylor) that she has a crush on Jason (Robert Manning). They eventually hook up. Kelly’s trying to sub-lease her apartment but when a mysterious malevolent power makes its presence felt, convincing her she has the power of life and death, she knows she won’t be able to. And at some point, this power turns Ruth into a brutal killer. That’s it. And yes, I’m aware that none of that makes any sense. Hey, don’t yell at me about it.
Not only does virtually nothing happen throughout this entire film, but Lauder forces us to watch two hours of a grainy yellow/green picture that looks as if it’s been lit by flourescents and shot with a non-white balanced camera. The low-rez recording’s intermittent jerking motion and the muddy sound mix obscuring achingly dull dialogue only makes the constant sickly color pall worse.
When the angel of death really does come after each of us, we hope to wind up in a better place and fear winding up in a worse one. Trust me, either would be preferable to spending eternity trapped in the void-like purgatory that is “The Angel of Death.”
