The Tall Man   Starring: Jessica Biel, Jodelle Ferland and Stephen McHattie Koch Media RRP: £15.99 KME005 Certificate: 15 Available 11 March 2013

Julia, a local nurse, keeps her young son David out of sight at her house. She has reason to be suspicious. A number of children have disappeared without trace from the small town of Cold Rock, apparently taken by a figure known only as the Tall Man. He has become a legend; a living embodiment of the Boogeyman, although some people believe he is supernatural. The mother of the last boy to have gone missing spends her days and nights, an emotional wreck, searching the town and surrounding woods for any evidence that he might have passed. The local sheriff can do nothing to ease the pain of the townsfolk, and his boss spends his nights sitting in his car hoping for a sighting. Now David has vanished and Julia is distraught. But who is really the innocent party here? And who may be more than they seem...

This is one of those films wherein you constantly change your opinion of the viewing fair. At the outset, you can’t help thinking this is a pathetic attempt to create another horror franchise character, without first doing the homework. The Tall Man is, of course, the villain of the piece in the Phantasm films. He’s not on his Summer retreat holiday away from the funeral parlour; this is another person altogether (who could know!). The plot then takes an interesting twist and, just when the story is again about to fall into a bottomless pit of ‘who cares?’, it surprises us again by stepping over the hole and presenting a new angle for events. Things will never be the same again... probably. In fact, there are more plot twists in this film than... than... a really twisty thing! In my humble opinion there are too many, because at one stage the movie begins to lose its way to confusion, before finding its main thrust in the last ten minutes. It hammers its point home, almost screaming ‘Ha ha, we fooled you’ with its intent.

This is an okay sort of horror/thriller, but it must surely lose a point or two for the way it is presented to the reviewer (that’s me, folks!). Not only did I receive no retail packaging (which is required to review the package as a whole), but I wasn’t even presented with a check disc. This one came on a blank DVD-R, with the title scrawled on the outside. As if that wasn’t insult enough, the film print contained a continuous time code, and a periodic warning across the screen. Yes, we get it that this is the property of Koch Media, but you are not dealing with black market pirate copiers here. I have been reviewing releases for this highly reputable site for a number of years now, so a little respect wouldn’t go amiss.

4

Ty Power