Art as either a conduit for evil, or a form inspired by evil has been used in many horror films down through the years, and Art of the Dead makes no bones about taking a little of both of these ideas as its central thread. The resulting film is a crowd of ideas, which translates to an attempt to throw a great deal at the screen in the nowadays rather slim running time of ninety minutes.
We begin with an art collector returning home with a new piece, a canvas depicting a lion. The piece of art clearly has quite an effect on him, not least because this means he’s completed his collection of other animal paintings by the same artist. His family are strangely uninterested however; this provokes great irritation on his part. He retreats to his collection – but, the now completed range of paintings suddenly seems to have a bewildering, disturbing effect on him. And then…are they time lapses? Hallucinations? Or genuine murders, which the paintings have inspired? (We can assume these aren’t hallucinations, I’d say.) When our erstwhile art collector tries to destroy the works, he finds that they have a supernatural ability to ward him off…and thus concludes our experiences with this particular family. Safe to say it hasn’t ended well.
The artwork is retrieved, and we next encounter it at auction – an auction hosted by a lady called Tess (the indefatigable Tara Reid in a small cameo role). Now listed as ‘Dorian Wilde’s collection’, there’s a great buzz around the auction room as some very well-dressed bidders try to get their hands on said collection. The winning bidders are the Wilsons (Lukas Hassel and Jessica Morris), but they are soon warned by a mysterious former priest (Robert Donavan) not to hang the paintings; no one encounters these works of art without incurring serious harm, he tells them. Well. They don’t listen of course, displaying the art all over their plush mansion, and they soon have a strange, negative effect on the family members – including Dylan’s visiting twentysomething son Louis (Zachary Chyz), who only happens to be an artist himself. Gradually, Louis begins to see vision of Dorian Wilde, all whilst his family members get subsumed by the deadly sins which have inspired each artwork, and while those in the know – including before too long Louis’s girlfriend Kim (Alex Rinehart) – try to break the spell.
That’s a brief synopsis of the plot then, but rest assured, there are hints and pointers to all manner of other potential themes along the way too. Clearly there are ideas here, but I can’t help but feel that less would be more – for example, having Dorian Wilde reference Jack the Ripper, albeit briefly, was a whole other avenue which wasn’t (and probably couldn’t have been) explored with the time and resources available. In doing so much, the film felt a little like the series Night Gallery, though not confined to one painting/one episode, instead cramming a series worth in. Tonally the film was a little difficult to place, too: in some aspects, it’s played for high camp (a tactic which I think works best, given other practical factors), but then again, there are some moments of (pretty decent) practical gore effects and prosthetics, which seem to suggest the film reaching for something else (as do the frequent moments of titillation along the way, one of the director Rolfe Kanesky’s major calling cards). All told, it’s very busy, and there’s quite a lot to digest, which can be a little jarring as you wonder whether this is a straightforward horror yarn, or something altogether more wry. Also – and it’s the eye of the beholder I know – but the paintings themselves are not quite as ominous as the characters seem to suggest in their behaviour, so it’s a little difficult to suspend disbelief here as people refer to them as ‘masterpieces’. Again – high camp? I could never fully relax into a sense of this.
Essentially, there is just so much going on that events begin to zip past you in Art of the Dead – as much as it’s largely a positive trait in a film to have such ambitions to get a great deal done in a film on a low budget. Sometimes taking a breath and stripping things back a little might have been the best course of action, however.