Red Victoria

RED VICTORIA

A low-budget indie film that features innovative and realistic special effects, Red Victoria follows a somewhat snooty intellectual screenwriter named Jim as his agent railroads him into penning a horror script.  Jim, who has utter disdain for the genre, finds himself mentally blocked every time he sits down to work on the project.  He finds unwelcome inspiration when a woman named Victoria magically appears in his bed one night.  Victoria is an articulate but undead individual who sometimes looks like a zombie but can alter her appearance at will to appear normal.  She informs Jim that she’s there to serve as an editor on his horror screenplay.  Soon she tries to act as a muse by murdering people in Jim’s presence beginning with a psychotherapist and then moving on to the pool maintenance man, Jim’s agent, and others.  Jim develops a love-hate relationship with Victoria and recruits a friend to research ways to vanquish this particular type of spectral entity.  The friend procures a special dagger that, if used on Halloween, will reportedly do the trick and get Victoria out of Jim’s existence for good.  Will Jim succeed in ridding himself of Victoria, or will he remain haunted forever?  Watch this fun comedy/horror hybrid to find out.

Red Victoria looks and feels low-budget except for some astonishing special effects.  At one point a severed arm on a coffee table that looks at first like a cheap plastic prop springs to life, flips over, and points at something.  Victoria’s entrance scene, when she manifests as a badly-decayed corpse with empty eye sockets, is jaw-dropping.  Such moments of visual ingenuity are peppered throughout the plot, which is rather clever if one suspends one’s disbelief enough to overlook certain details and questions (I’m not sure how Jim disposed of the various bodies that piled up on his property).  Available on DVD through Amazon, Red Victoria is a singular movie that’s worth checking out this Halloween season for some laughs and chills.  The tone of the project begins weighted more toward comedy than horror but grows more serious as the story progresses.  An entertaining look at a writer who meets and becomes largely controlled by a murderous personification of his inner muse, Red Victoria runs just under ninety minutes and may well entertain genre fans in search of a unique horror/comedy tale.  I heartily recommend this memorable look at one man’s rocky journey to crank out a horror script.