New On Demand from Trinity Content Partners and Seven Tales!
Directed/Written by Carlos Goitia.
Check out the trailer here!!
Alison (Paula Brasca) wakes up in a basement filled with four other dead bodies. When she hears someone coming, she acts as if she is dead and witnesses a masked man-monster grabbing the bodies one at a time and taking them upstairs. Now Alison must find a way out before it is her turn to be taken and she really doesn’t want to know what is waiting for her up there.
The beauty of PLAY DEAD lays in its simplicity. The women have been abducted. The murders have been committed. Now all the man-monster has to do is…some kind of ritual that I won’t reveal here. This film goes beyond where many films go because at this point, there’s a final girl the slasher has to stalk and finally get defeated by. Instead of going down that tired slasher path, PLAY DEAD takes a simple premise of someone playing possum in order to survive and finds a way to extend that to a very tight one hour and ten-minute movie. And all of it comes together in a perversely perfect way.
It’s not that PLAY DEAD does anything too far outside of the slasher format. The killer is your basic stitch-masked mute. He has a family of sorts and that has everything to do with the abductions of the women in the basement. There’s even a dinner scene that plays with some of the same themes that TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE does. Still, through the fast pacing, bare bones script with very little dialog, and a truly gruesome setting, filmmaker Carlos Goitia, who recently did the stylized anthology 100 CANDLES GAME: THE LAST POSSESSION, delivers something unique and fun to watch.
Goita has a good eye for making this spin on the slasher genre feel fresh while using age old tropes. With PLAY DEAD, he skips the boring get to know you part and just tosses the viewer into the action in what would be the last half hour in most slasher films. The film zooms in on this cat and mouse, giving just enough information for one to follow the story. Sure, the characters are not as developed as well, but this film cuts straight to the fun stuff that draws us all to slasher films in the first place. Slasher fans, you’ve gotta check out PLAY DEAD. It’s going to surprise you!
