*** (3 Stars)
WARNING: This review may contain spoilers.
This was a weird one. The first 8 minutes of this movie is just a long warning explaining all about the mysterious deaths that occurred from people who have watched the movie, including an entire theater of people who died watching the movie as the theater burned. As it turned out, someone had laced the theater’s popcorn with LSD, and with that and the subliminal images and audio effects contained in the movie, they ended up setting fires in the theater. Allegedly.
The movie itself was a bit slow, but pretty much exactly what I would expect for a ’70s horror movie. The film quality and graininess seemed totally real, so think it was probably actually shot in the 70’s. If I had seen it back then, which would have been in my early teens, it may have traumatized me, but definitely not today, in my sixties. I did see tons of subliminal messages, and even captured one of them, which was in Latin and translated to “nothing is more precious than truth”. If you think you might be affected by subliminal messages or audio effects, you just might want to skip this one. Otherwise go for it. It’s a halfway decent story and the ending isn’t so bad. There is a LOT that goes unanswered though, so you might end up with a lot of questions. There were a lot of satanic rituals and symbolism throughout the movie too.
After the actual end of the movie there is about 5 minutes extra, which appear to be deleted scenes. Then there’s a message that says “You’ve just watched Antrum in its entirety”, then the actual credits roll. During the end credits is another 6 minutes detailing an investigation into the mysterious deaths surrounding the movie and details about the subliminal messages and audio effects that can effect some people.
There was only one scene that really bothered me because it just seemed so out of place and fake compared to the rest of the movie: It was a stop-motion animated squirrel. Well, sort of a squirrel, it seemed like somewhat of a puppet, but if it were a puppet, why use stop-motion to animated it? Maybe it was all they had back in the 70’s, but I thought THIS scene should have been one that they deleted, and they should have left IN the scenes they actually deleted.
JimTrottier.com 