CAUTION: Plot spoilers present.Esteemed young documentary filmmaker Teri Brewer finds out on her mother's deathbed that she was adopted & that she had a slightly older brother who was placed into a mental asylum following the brutal but unsolved murder of their parents when they were infants. Tracking down the brother (named Alex), Teri & her boyfriend find themselves in danger when a malevolent spirit that had been residing in a video game that Alex had been playing at the time of the deaths comes out & uses Alex's body has a host in order to kill again.The Dread answers the question of whatever happened to female THE EVIL DEAD star Ellen Sandweiss – she's still stuck doing ultra-cheap horror schlock twenty years after her breakthrough role. But unlike The Evil Dead, which was gleefully inventive & darkly funny, The Dread is neither of those things.The main problem I had with the film was the central concept of a malevolent entity residing in a video game – as a dedicated video game player, I find any attempt by the conservative types out there to blame videogames as violent garbage that warps minds as nothing but unfounded rubbish (these same types also decry genre films as violent & bad for children but think nothing about allowing young people access to firearms – this kind of hypocrisy is what gets me really fired up in anger). The story is filled with stupid plot devices that make it look really bad in the eyes of genre fans – security is tight in the soon-to-be-closed asylum but a pair of horny teens manage to sneak in using a long forgotten service door that nobody in the asylum's staff even bothers to remember to use when the crap hits the fan. Some of the characters have been poorly written – Sandweiss' character walks around always holding a pencil (& sure enough gets impaled with all of her pencils in one of the film's more entertaining deaths], while some of the 'crazies' running around are age-old clichés.The film does manage to compensate slightly by having a reasonably gory third act but the climax fails to coherently explain the nature of the entity – the early parts of the film make a vague claim that the creature is living inside the video game that the child was playing, but later on the creature seems to be born inside the host & can jump to a sibling when the host dies. Nothing is explained satisfactorily enough to carry the film along, leaving the film to collapse like a house of cards.

This slasher - it aired during a slasher week shown on the horror channel anyways - features upwards of twenty victims. You would expect it to feature high amounts of blood and gore but surprisingly that isn't the case.The protagonist has a brother in a mental institution. She takes forever to get there because... well actually as far as I've seen there is no because, someone decided a slasher movie with a side story about the protagonist's life running throughout the first half was a good idea. Really, cutting it to her simply finding out she's adopted would have sufficed. While that's happening superfluous characters get killed off, including a couple who break into a working mental facility and make love. Sadly I'm not kidding.Minor spoiler: The movie features a vacuous, annoying assistant type. She literally walks out of the film considerably before the climax. That's right, out of any characters they could've spared they chose the least likable.Minor spoiler #2: The couple broke in through a door. Somehow later the doors are sealed shut. Given that the institution is closing down you'd think they wouldn't have time for that, assuming they even knew a door had been tampered with.

The concept seems simple but interesting. A asylum stricken young man Alex seems to be able to transform into a maniacal vicious creature with the ability of becoming non corporeal. He is in the asylum due to becoming non responsive after the brutal murder of his parents, something which his monstrous alter ego could be responsible for. The creature has laid dormant for years until a doctor revives old memories for Alex. The killings become more violent when his biological sister Teri comes for a visit(she was adopted after the parents were murdered).This film starts out okay (i'm talking the first couple of minutes), but quickly suffers a downward spiral. If this were a student film for a school project, it would rate well. But it isn't, so it doesn't. Obviously this film had bugger all budget, but i have seen better films on a shoe string budget. Supporting actors seem to be people giving it there best shot, but most of them don't make the grade. The music score is b grade but acceptably so. Includes some horror clichés, like horny teenagers breaking into the asylum for a cheap scare. Word of advise, if you take your date into an asylum and she strips saying she's always wanted to have sex in one, she is most likely nuts herself so i'd steer clear.The point of view shot coming up behind the main character to try and trick the viewer into thinking the killer is behind them. Usually filmmakers do this shot after the killer is loose, not before. The creature is poor and is quite obviously a guy in a costume. If the mouth moved when it talked, it might redeem it a little. But it didn't, so it doesn't. There is some blood and guts for gore hounds, but not great views of it as it will become obvious that they are animal parts from the butcher shop or corn syrup mixed with red food dye. Best performances go to the lead detective played by Marvin Bernard and asylum ward caretaker Sid Ellis. The asylum manager played by Ellen Sandweiss completely overacts and would have expected more from someone who seems to have the most acting experience in the whole movie (she was in the first Evil Dead). Alex's sister played by Sally Pressman is adequate.

To start off the movie's title 'The Dread' is not captivating as it sounds like a terrible remake of a Japanese Horror. However the dingy title matches the cinematic quality as the film is utterly abysmal. With a shoestring budget that's been used depressingly bad its evident the creators of this film had no idea what they were doing; the plot, copious amount of cliché's, dreadful acting, screenplay, special effects; the whole movie is a giant train wreck that I'm surprised was ever released to DVD.The film starts out with a wannabe opening from Halloween; homage or not it's executed in a very uninteresting way and it is almost as though the creators are trying to pass it off as their own with an alter ego addition. The story is about a child's "inner evil" that murders his parentals in their bed whilst his real body sits in front of a scratchy pictured television screen whilst playing a video game – little tension and atmosphere as it seems to be shot on someone's digital home video. A decade or so later the now grown up child is locked away in a derelict mental clinic – does this not sound familiar already? Teri, the protagonist discovers that her long lost brother is the same boy who killed his parent's year's back and she decides to see her apparent brother with her own eyes. As the night goes on in the clinic with supernaturally locked doors the film turns into a very typical, badly written and ugly acted slasher. Even if the film had been executed professionally it still would have been insanely unoriginal and mind numbingly dumb. This is Halloween with minor alterations only this time it's very hard to sit through and even see as the picture quality is so bad.The picture quality is very terrible ranging from unintentionally too dark attics and hallways to audio that goes up and down throughout and the actors are as though they were taken from a bus stop. My drama class back in school could have done a better job at blocking and delivering lines than anyone in the film did. The only person who is acceptable is The Evil Deads cult star Ellen Sandwiess, possibly because she has about one or two lines and even then is the only actor who is mildly convincing. The special effects look like tomato sauce and water and even looked like water at times however at least the gore was there even though in an over the top fashion. Torn up torso's that look like mannequins made of foam with gore that looks like dried up PVA glue spilling from it is nonsensical. The paranormal being an element of the film is not an excuse either. It's pathetic and tries to use gore to make a scary villain which is a huge no-no. There is no budget that is an excuse for such a terrible film like this.Absolutely everything in this film was pathetic and I am surprised I sat through its entire duration. It makes one agitated that there are people out there in the industry with real talent and well structured ideas that never get their way into film. The Dread is a bad film and this is coming from a reviewer who has intentionally seen hundreds of films with bad reputations. The dread is way at the bottom of the barrel and won't even form into a so-bad-its-good cult film. Nothing can save you from the dread of The Dread. Avoid.