Ghost Rig (2003)

the audience applauded

Did you people see the same film I saw?

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

A group of eco-warriors occupy a disused oil rig scheduled for demolition. It's not long before murder and madness erupts...A great idea rendered unwatchable by a cast of dummies and a script seemingly written by a ten year old. Once again, the producers and director have opted for pretty or handsome faces instead of talented actors. Good actors can usually make something of bad scripts, but bad actors always fail... Worst of a bad bunch is Jaason Simmons who gives a performance of such shocking ineptitude I got the uncontrollable giggles every time he spoke, whilst other cast members are forced to repeat cheesy lines like 'I've got a really bad feeling about this' again and again. Unwatchable tosh of the worst kind.

The Devil's Tattoo is set in the North sea just off the coast of Scotland & starts as ten members of an environmental protection group called Action Planet land on an abandoned oil rig called Janus which is due to be sunk & left as a natural reef, the activists lead by Vincent (Jaason Simmons) disagree with the plans & feel it will pollute the sea. The group find the rig totally abandoned & can only muster a limited power supply, while looking around Eric (Rory McCann) is bitten by a rat & he then kills his mate Kay (Richard Norton). Things get strange when it is in fact Eric who is found dead by the other's & Kay destroys the radio, the only way the group had to contact the outside world. Then bizarrely Kay is found dead, as the group investigate they find video recordings made by the oil rig workers that claim an evil body jumping spirit is on the loose. No-one is able to trust anyone else as the evil spirit jumps from body to body...This English production is perhaps better known under it's widely released working title of Ghost Rig & was co-written, co-produced & directed by Julian Kean, the best way to describe The Devil's Tattoo is to think of a cross between The Thing (1982) & Ghost Ship (2002) which doesn't exactly sound like a match made in heaven but I thought The Devil's Tattoo had some good aspects but at the the same time it has some bad ones which overall let it down. I suppose what it boils down to is whether you can overcome the bad & enjoy the good because if you can't then you will have a hard time watching The Devil's Tattoo. The script by Kean, Sally Charlton along with producers Bill Dale & Greame Clapperton takes the well used horror film storyline of some sort of bodily possession as seen so effectively in The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Hidden (1987) & Fallen (1998) to name but a few the only difference here is that it's an evil ghost rather than an alien invader but the principal is still the same. This aspect of the film isn't used as effectively as it could have been, the audience is almost always made aware of who is possessed & therefore a lot of potential intrigue & tension is lost. Then there's the bunch of survivors running around the dark corridors of an isolated location trying to survive angle to the story, I'm sorry but to me scene after scene after scene of people wandering around near pitch black corridors just becomes tedious & annoying. Then there's the really left of center strange twist ending which I doubt anyone will see coming but is just so odd & not entirely satisfying. To it's credit it's just a complete surprise & fairly cleverly thought out but I didn't think it was an appropriate way to finish the film & didn't work. The character's are alright although at the start there are maybe slightly too many to keep track of but as they are killed off it becomes less of a problem.Director Kean does OK here, he makes the most out of his locations although as I have said there's too much walking around dark corridors. There are a few problems with the story too, for instance if anyone possessed is healed why at the end when Mole is cut does his wound not heal? When he gets shot why doesn't he heal? It contradicts everything that has happened before surely? Also we never find out what this evil demon thing is, there is some vague reference to the oil rig workers messing around with Voodoo (yeah because most North sea oil rig workers perform evil Voodoo rituals on the platform during their time off don't they?) but nothing beyond that. There isn't even any reason given as to why it needs to jump from body to body, I mean does it do it just for fun? To my eyes there didn't seem to be a lot of point to it. The gore is limited to a few stab wounds & a bit of blood as The Devil's Tattoo goes for psychological horror which is only partially successful since it reveals who is possessed to easily. There's a reasonably good atmosphere though with the dark rundown & abandoned oil rig making for an effectively sinister & isolated setting.Technically the film is good & it seems to have decent production values, I'm not sure if this was shot on a real oil rig but it wouldn't surprise me if it was. The end credits claim it was shot in Scotland & London, that it was funded at least in part by the National Lottery & The Devil's Tattoo is maybe the only film I have seen which has a 'Portable Toilets Supplied By' credit! The acting is alright to be fair although I didn't recognise anyone in it.The Devil's Tattoo could have been a good creepy psychological horror film but is actually a relatively slow film with some good ideas but too much wandering around in the dark doing nothing in particular. I wouldn't call it a bad film just one with a lot more potential, I am in two minds really as I liked some aspects of it but disliked other's.

In the realm of group-of-people-trapped-with-something-picking-them-off-one-by-one films, there has not been a lot of innovation since Alien and Evil Dead.Not surprisingly, this film does not offer much you have not seen already (at least if you are like me and watch all the thrillers, splatter and horror films you can). Direction and acting could be better, but are satisfactory in most respects within the given limits.Surprisingly however, this one hits the nail on the head in every aspect of the story.The snags in this kind of story has always been these three questions: Why are they in the monster's lair, why don't they leave, and why do they split up? When these questions are not answered to my satisfaction, my suspension of disbelief fails. Then it is obviously just a question of producing a popcorn movie for 15-year-olds to snigger at and forget immediately.But here, the basic premise works, and each question is answered logically: the ten protagonists are eco-activists who board an oil rig to stop it from being toppled. Farfetched as this may sound, it could happen, and I have no doubt Greenpeace activists entertained a similar thought with Brent Spar in those days. Since they need to find the crew of the rig (but expect no problems beyond being told to bugger off), they search the place, and when they find nobody there, they are in a fix, as their very presence is what prevents the oil company from sinking the rig. So they have to stay. (The "weather closing in" excuse preventing the helicopter from returning is ridiculous though, as all the exterior shots of the rig show calm weather with barely any wind at all).In addition to this initial premise, the rest of the story (and the twist-in-the-tale in particular) holds water in a way I had not expected. A rare sight these days, when even Stephen King expects us to believe that local police suspecting a divorced husband of murdering his ex-wife and her lover will not even dig up his back yard fifteen feet from the house (not to mention the fact that as he lived in another state, it would become an FBI case with all the additional resources this would entail).

A small group of environmental activists land on and take over an oil rig that seems to have been left vacant. No crew members can be found, but odd things start to happen nonetheless. Sound familiar? It should, as the same formula has been used in horror movies before, over and over. Isolation, internal conflicts between crew members...'Alien' turned it into a franchise, and 'Ghost Ship' wasn't half bad either. This low-budget Brit flick however is no 'Alien'.You can tell it's director Julian Kean's first time on the wheel of a project of this magnitude. The camera work is simple, minimal. Short clips of the crew keeping a video journal try to establish a documentary-like feel, adding a sense of realism...or trying to, anyway. The acting is for the most part actually surprisingly good. However, where the movie is really lacking, is the writing. There's no credible dialogue, and while the movie takes forever to really get going, there isn't enough character development or emphasis on any one event to actually provide the audience with an interest in what is happening. Nothing happens at first, then a lot happens at once, and you are left wondering what the point was.There's serious effort here, especially from the cast, but the material they are working with just doesn't amount to much.