Movies
Pink Eye
“An imperfect, offensive, low budget horror nightmare. Pink Eye may at times seem like it was rush produced, but the low budget atmosphere quickly absorbs the minor bumps and blemishes and allows a strong ensemble to shine through like the sheen of a bloody pool seeping through the ceiling from an upstairs murder scene.”
What would it take for you to pull your own eyes out? Not just pop out your own eyeballs… peel your eyelids off, too. Pop out those slimy orbs and pull those optics nerves until they snap. Force your fingers into the holes left in the front of your face. Reach in, and pick at the flesh until you can pull out chunks of brain meat like ground, bloody sausage. For one patient in this asylum for the insane – it’s a combo of drugs mixed with PCP causing her and scores of other patients to become homicidal maniacs. In Pink Eye, the mad have been medicated with uberviolent experimental pharmaceutical cocktails, and those who don’t tear out their own eyes are killing the staff and about to break out of the facility onto the streets. For one family living in a town nearby, life is about to become a living hell.
Savage Roses Productions (Addiction, Aunt Rose, Eat Your Heart Out) returns with director James Tucker at the helm once again, guiding another sick ship written by Joshua Nelson. Pink Eye centers around a prison-like hospital for the severe mentally ill, where two doctors are conducting chemical tests, injecting phencyclidine into the rabidly mad. Phencyclidine, known on the streets as PCP, is a psychotropic anesthetic that was infamous for disconnecting its user from their environment or body, allowing them to become capable of extreme actions because of their high threshold for pain – such as breaking bones to pull ones own hands through handcuff rings, or yanking on the steel so inhumanly hard that the links actually break.
Deemed illegal and banned from use, two doctors (under the guidance of a greedy, heartless pharmaceutical company) are leading tests nonetheless, injecting PCP cocktails into the mad. The result is an extreme outbreak of homicidal mania and self abuse, as patients tear themselves and others to shreds, about to break out upon the streets of an innocent town at any moment. One particular patient has taken to the drugs in a most unique way – his body deformed and covered in open sores, his mind twisted into a knot that wants to kill every last living creature in the world with his bare hands, blistering with poetry – Edgar breaks out and the body count soon begins to rise.
Edgar (played commandingly by newcomer Joshua James) is not normal. He wears the creepy mask of a swollen, pink eye victim, and about every word he speaks are quotations from Edgar Allen Poe. He poetically maneuvers his way through the hospital dispatching lives with scalpels and a pairs of human hands driven by the maddest of minds. When he gets out, crosses the woods and meets the little girl of a nearby family within, his focus soon turns to Delilah, an exceptionally beautiful victim. Delilah (played by the alluring Melissa Bacelar) is quickly captured, and soon its up to Brandon (Joshua Nelson) and an investigating officer to enter the asylum, survive the bloody carnival of evil within, and save her from the grips of a hell bent maniac.
The gore, when it struck, was supreme. Broken heads, knuckle deep eye wounds – the makeup and effects are vicious and convincing (save the bad angle on the crowbar/skull piercing at the end). The acting was especially far and beyond. Melissa Bacelar has a great screen presence. She dominates with ultra feminine charisma and is addicting to watch, and can even steal a scene from a cute little girl. Nelson is a little masculine monotone in his role, but its like an artistic grey that allows the other colors to seem more vibrant. From Raine Brown’s freak out sessions to the excessively cute Emma Hinz – Pink Eye is an example of how good low budget horror can be when you have a mega-talented cast and crew behind it. Joshua Nelson’s screenplay is lively and oddly artistic – the actors are as sharp as scalpels – Marc Fratto (director of Last Rites of the Dead) inputs on an excellent atmospheric soundtrack – and James Tucker brings out the most it has to offer with another directorial slam dunk that lingers like a lingering, vivid nightmare.
Final analysis: An imperfect, offensive, low budget horror nightmare. Pink Eye may at times seem like it was rush produced, but the low budget atmosphere quickly absorbs the minor bumps and blemishes and allows a strong ensemble to shine through like the sheen of a bloody pool seeping through the ceiling from an upstairs murder scene. Once again, Savage Roses puts together a ton of underrated talent and delivers a uniquely raw horror experience – its shortcomings being the budget only. The directing, bloody effects, and acting take this film far beyond the mass of low budget efforts. It has that gritty 70’s feel of an early Tom Savini/Wes Craven cross. Id even go so far to say that if Tucker’s films had been introduced to wide audiences in theaters in the late 70’s, I think he could have made as strong an impact as the like of an early Carpenter or Craven. What comes across in the end isn’t the same style (to each their own) – but it manages to tattoo your imagination with a likewise unique strength. In the past five years, when it comes to low budget films, Id be pressed to name a better horror filmmaking team than Joshua Nelson and James Tucker. If you don’t manage to catch Pink Eye at a conspicuous late night theater on the coast, watch for it through pus-crusted eyes to hit DVD shelves in 2008.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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