Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		1.5

Playback Blu-ray Movie Review

Or, a film that will make you wish you could magnetically erase a Blu-ray like a VHS tape.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater May 11, 2012

Midway through Playback, yet another tired teen horror film about a haunted videotape, I had a stabbing moment of sad exasperation. Like a fed-up buddy movie cop one week from retirement, it suddenly hit me: I'm too old for this s--t. Granted, I am 30 and a few years outside of the film's target demographic of early twenty-somethings who desperately wish they were still in high school, but here's the thing--I think everyone is too old for this kind of intelligence-insulting nonsense. My "well, it is aimed at teenagers" tolerance for bad writing and cringe-worthy acting has finally bottomed out, and I'm left with a new credo: A turd of a movie is a turd of a movie, no matter who's watching.

And Playback stinks. It might be the worst horror film I've seen so far this year, and that's saying something considering I've sat through The Devil Inside and Human Centipede 2. With a been-done-to-death premise, a lack of anything remotely resembling tension, and the goofiest oh-so-emo antagonist in recent memory, it's an all-around tedious experience that takes itself way too seriously for how unimaginably awful it is.

Think of all the films you could be watching instead of this one.

Thirty-one-year-old actor Johnny Pacar is older than I am, but he's somehow cast as high school senior Julian, a wannabe filmmaker obsessed with a gruesome family murder that took place in town way back in 1994. (Which is, like, forever ago, amirite?) The movie opens with a glitchy, over-edited flashback to the crime, perpetrated by one Harlan Diehl (Luke Bonczyk), an adopted teenager who brutally kills his parents and sister, but not--mysteriously--his sis's newborn baby. Didja realize immediately that a baby born in 1994 would turn 18 in 2012, the year the film is set? I bet you did. Will the movie still try to surprise you with a twist about the identity of said baby, even though you've already guessed it correctly by the end of the first act? Why, of course. Before you get up in arms, trust me, there's no such thing as a spoiler for a movie this persistently stupid. I'd probably do you a huge favor if I just flat-out revealed all of the story's turns, saving you from potentially wasting an hour and a half actually watching it.

Anyway, Julian and his friends have been shooting a recreation of the murder for a civics class project, and they've been borrowing camera equipment from a mop-haired loner named Quinn (Toby Hemingway), a gas-huffing recent graduate who now works as a archivist at the local TV news station. When Julian asks Quinn to track down some raw video footage from the crime scene, Quinn inevitably watches it and-- shocker--becomes possessed by an evil contained within. He grows gaunt and pasty, covered by sores and a weird white powder, and soon enough he looks like a young emo Emperor Palpatine and has aquired the ability to mind-control teenaged girls into doing his dark bidding. Or something.

But get this: Quinn's transformation is linked to Harlan Diehl being the great-great-great-great grandson of Louis Le Prince, one of the forgotten, real- life fathers of cinema, whose pioneering work in early motion pictures was unjustly overshadowed by later competitors like the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison. In Playback, it's theorized that Louis Le Prince may have been the honest-to-goodness devil. As in, Satan himself. Louis stands for "Lucifer," duh, and--hello!--Le Prince of Darkness? It's pretty obvious, right? And isn't it plausible Le Prince was using his newfangled camera to steal his actors' souls?

What's so depressing here is that Le Prince's life is genuinely fascinating, and he deserves better than to have Playback listed as a footnote on his Wikipedia entry. Once Quinn becomes possessed, the film plays out like a cross-pollination of The Ring and a standard teen slasher, a lame attempt to mix supernatural/technological spooks with visceral blood and guts. There are a few quasi-explicit kills--a cracked CD to the eyeball, some pulpy bullet exit wounds--but nothing that'll get gorehounds salivating. As for gratuitous T&A, I've neglected to mention the subplot about Quinn hiding cameras in the girls' locker room and selling the footage to a pervy ephebophilic cop, played by none other than a hardcore slumming Christian Slater. I'm assuming he did this one for the paycheck, and not the challenge and/or joy of playing this particularly greasy character.

Slater ain't bad, actually, but the rest of the cast...well, to be generous, let's just say that the script isn't doing them any favors. The film was written and directed by Michael A. Nickles, who played Jim Morrison in Wayne's World 2--no kidding--and had a modest career as a TV actor before jumping behind the camera. Nickles has no idea what makes a horror film work, building his story out of genre cliches that were stale a decade ago, forcing his characters to talk in dated teen-speak--"It's murder-palooza up in this bitch!"--and cutting the whole thing together with mind-numbing techno-rock. There's not a single shock or scare to be found here, and there's no logic whatsoever to the metaphysics of Le Prince's "curse." I have a feeling if someone could travel back in time and show the real Le Prince a copy of Playback, he'd trash his camera prototype with a heavy sigh, depressed his invention could be used for such mindless, styleless garbage.

Playback Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Playback has that distinct, low-budget-horror-shot-on-mid-level-digital-video vibe, and although it was clearly made on the cheap, it gets a solid, 1080p/AVC-encoded Blu-ray presentation courtesy of Magnolia Home Entertainment. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say the picture looks "cinematic"--the cinematography is pretty bland--but the image is clean and fairly sharp and decently graded. There's plenty of high definition detail visible in close-ups, from Christian Slater's scruffy five o'clock shadow to the pasty textures of Toby Hemingway's heavily made-up face, and even longer shots look well- defined. Color is well-saturated and processed to have a sort of punchy realism, with good contrast and solid black levels. There are moments when highlights look a bit overexposed and washed out, but it's never a persistent problem. Likewise, there are no real compression issues beyond occasionally noticeable source noise and a few instances of very mild banding. This isn't a title you'll seek out for its stunning picture quality, but for what it is--a z-grade straight to video horror flick--it doesn't look half bad.

Playback Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Similarly, the film's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track falls squarely into good-but-not-great territory, with sound design that at least makes an effort, even if it's sometimes hokey and over-the-top. Like most horror films, there's an attempt here to craft an immersive and engaging soundscape, with robust use of the rear channels for ambience and cross- channel effects, but Playback unfortunately relies on a stale "scary" audio gimmick that should've died out in the early '00s--glitchy static punching in and out, a "ghost in the machine" sort of sound that's now seriously overplayed. The other persistent element in the mix is the godawful soundtrack, which veers from angsty whine to pseudo-dubstep to cheesy metal, sometimes all within the same song. The worst song features lyrics about "stupid American trash," and seems like a blatant lesser-than ripoff of LCD Soundsystem's "North American Scum." Dialogue is always cleanly recorded and easily understood though, and the disc comes with optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles for those that might need or want them.

Playback Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes (1080p, 7:35): Your usual behind-the-scenes piece, with some on-set footage and a few quick interviews.
• Photo Gallery (1080p): A user directed gallery with a whopping 71 stills.
• HDNet: A Look at Playback (1080i, 4:43): A typical HDNet promo, featuring clips from the film and an interview with the director.
• Trailer (1080p, 2:14)
• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment Blu-ray (1080p, 9:29)

Playback Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

An early contender for worst horror film of 2012, Playback plods and grates and annoys in equal measure. It's not scary. Its story doesn't make any sense. It features Christian Slater as a perv with an eye for underaged girls. Do I need to go on? The film looks and sounds decent on Blu-ray, but there's no redeeming this mess. Avoid at all costs.