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[Review] ‘Delirium’ is Boring and Stumbles Over Itself
If you’re in the market to have a thoroughly frustrating time, look no further. Stuntman-turned-director Johnny Martin brings us his latest film, Delirium, a would-be supernatural thriller told partially in the found footage format.
The plot sees a group of 20-something-year-old men — referenced once or twice as “The Hell Gang” – dare a wannabe member to reach the porch of an old mansion, supposedly haunted by a family that was murdered there. When the rest of the group gets busted by the police outside the mansion’s barbed-wire perimeter, they decide to go in after their friend. Armed with a camera and some flashlights, they scale the fences and make their way through the woods and up to the large, creepy house, prepared to take on anything that may be lurking inside it.
Delirium manages to make a pretty decent mess of itself, beginning with its inability to decide on a filming style. The format switches between the found footage technique, POV, and a traditional filming approach- and not for any strategic reason. Maybe this seems like a nitpick, but as there is not much else to focus on throughout the movie, it becomes a glaring issue. It’s distracting, confusing, and takes the viewer right out of the film. The movie even seems to confuse itself, incorporating a musical score at moments when we’re supposed to be watching one of our leads, Austin (Griffin Freeman), film his friends.
To make matters worse, Delirium is just outright boring. There is not much story to get lost in, the characters lack any amount of depth, and the film runs much too long and takes an inordinate amount of time to get to the action. Delirium clocks in at only an hour and twenty-six minutes, yet the group takes 45 minutes just to arrive at the mansion. All the while, the guys trek through the woods, scaring one another every so often. This quickly becomes vexatious, even to the characters themselves. Even when the group eventually gets inside the mansion, nothing of note really happens. Unlike a film such as Ti West’s The House of the Devil, which makes a calculated decision to draw out the tension and save its scares for the very end, Delirium never builds any tension and never makes up for the 45 minutes spent venturing up to the main location.
What’s most frustrating about Delirium is that it has good bones, but stumbles over itself. The premise, paired with the found footage style, may have worked better about ten years ago, but a decent story is there. The shots are competently composed, the effects are elementary but not bad. The film even has something really cool to boast: a weird, creepy, and unique opening credits segment that is somehow the highlight of the entire movie.
However, where the film goes wrong is when it fails to choose a single direction and see it through. Delirium is too ambitious for its ability and its budget (there are multiple visual allusions to The Shining, but unfortunately no sign of a Kubrick-sized allowance). It tries to be both found footage/POV and cinematic at once, spends most of its time in the woods but wants to call itself a haunted house thriller, wants to be a simple thrill-ride without complex characters but quickly tries to fabricate a strong bond between its subjects towards the end. If Delirium had been able to decide what it was going for and stuck with it, perhaps a passable film could have been pieced together. Sadly, what we are left with, instead, is a mixture with too many flavors to be any good.
Scream Factory brought Frank LaLoggia’s 1988 Halloween movie Lady in White to Blu-ray several years back, and now Vinegar Syndrome gives the film a 4K Ultra HD upgrade.
Vinegar Syndrome’s Lady in White 4K release is available now and shipping now!
Watch the trailer below and grab your copy from Vinegar Syndrome today.
This limited edition 4-disc 4K UHD/Blu-ray x 3 set comes with a spot gloss hard slipcase + slipcover combo (designed by Dylan Haley), includes a 40-page perfect bound book and is limited to 8,000 units. It is only available on their website and at select indie retailers.
The full Special Features package includes…
- 4-disc Set: 1x 4K Ultra HD (High Bitrate BD100) / 3x Region A Blu-ray
- 4K UHD presented in Dolby Vision High-Dynamic-Range
- Newly scanned & restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative
- Presented in three versions: 126-min Pre-Release Director’s Cut (UHD+BD), the 118-min Extended Home Video Cut (BD), and the 113-min Theatrical Cut (BD)
- New group commentary track with writer/director Frank LaLoggia, alongside actors Lukas Haas, Joelle Jacobi, and Len Cariou for the Pre-Release Director’s Cut
- New commentary track with Frank LaLoggia, moderated by Scott Neumyer for the Extended Home Video Cut
- New commentary track with authors Emma Westwood and Stephen A. Russell for the Extended Home Video Cut
- Archival commentary track with Frank LaLoggia for the Extended Home Video Cut
- “Learning How to Fly” (10 min) – an interview with actress Karen Powell
- “A Snapshot in Time” (9 min) – an interview with actress Lisa Taylor
- “Human Touches” (6 min) – an interview with actress Lucy Lee Flippin
- “Still Relevant” (16 min) – an interview with actress Rose Weaver
- “75% Listening, 25% Editing” (9 min) – an interview with editor Steve Mann
- “Welcome to Willowpoint Falls” (6 min) – a location featurette hosted by Benjamin Scrivens, founder of Fright-Rags
- “Dream Talking: Looking Back” – a visual group commentary for the Pre-Release Director’s Cut with Frank LaLoggia, and actors Lukas Haas, Joelle Jacobi, and Len Cariou (103 min)
- Deleted Scenes with introduction and optional commentary by writer/director Frank LaLoggia (36 min)
- Behind-the-scenes footage with introduction and optional commentary by writer/director Frank LaLoggia (16 min)
- Extended behind-the-scenes footage (73 min)
- Introduction from the 20th anniversary dvd release
- Promotional ‘industry sales’ trailer (7 min)
- 40-page perfect bound book with essays by film historians Molly Henery, Mark H. Harris, and Heidi Honeycutt (limited edition only)
- Multiple radio spots
- Theatrical trailer
- Multiple TV spots
- Workprint trailers (7 min)
- Still gallery
- Reversible sleeve artwork
- English SDH subtitles
1962. Nine-year-old Frankie Scarlatti enjoys a homespun childhood in a rustic Western New York town. The entire community gets into the spirit of Halloween, but then two bullies prank Frankie by locking him in his school cloakroom, leaving him trapped for the night. Alone and afraid, his slumber is interrupted when the ghost of a little girl appears, and Frankie witnesses the specter of her murder by an unseen assailant. Later, while recovering at home, the girl’s ghost appears to him again. With help from his older brother, Frankie begins investigating the circumstances of her death. He soon discovers that her murder was one of several unsolved crimes connected to a local child-killer. As the town’s bucolic veneer fades and long-buried secrets and tensions bubble to the surface, all of the clues to the mystery seem to point towards a huge mansion inhabited by a reclusive woman known as “The Lady in White.”
A nostalgia-driven ghost story wrapped within an intricate murder mystery and coming-of-age drama, writer-director-composer Frank LaLoggia’s passion project Lady in White remains one of the most beautiful and original American horror films of the 1980s. Featuring acclaimed actors Alex Rocco (The Godfather), Len Cariou (Executive Decision), and Sydney Lassick (Carrie, The Unseen), it boasts the first starring role by Lukas Haas (Mars Attacks, Inception) as well as breathtaking photography by Academy Award® winner Russell Carpenter (True Lies, The Lawnmower Man). Vinegar Syndrome is honored to bring this genre masterpiece to 4K UHD, newly restored from its original 35mm camera negative and presented in three versions: its pre-release director’s cut, its extended home-video version, and its original theatrical version, along with an abundance of both new and archival extras.
Paul Lê wrote here on Bloody Disgusting back in 2023, “Over the years, fans have described this film as gateway horror, but they liken it more to The Watcher in the Woods than, say, Hocus Pocus or Casper. There are chilling moments that warrant its PG-13 rating.”
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