2018’s “Dead Heading” also known as “How I spent my weekend watching a woman explore a holiday inn” is a 2018 “Horror”, “Thriller” and I feel the need to use quote marks on those genres here because there’s neither frights nor tension to be found anywhere near this thing. The brainchild of David Easton, a (seemingly) british filmmaker (I can’t confirm that) who dabbles in independent filmmaking, and, rather unfortunately, we once again find ourselves staring down the barrel of a movie that’s had most of its marketing made up in order to try and shift copies. First and foremost, the air hostess on the front cover, I’m pretty sure isn’t in the movie, and if she is, she isn’t wearing that outfit, nor does she have red eyes at any point, NOR does she brandish a kitchen knife…oh she does wield a knife briefly…it’s a steak knife. Which is quite a step down from the full blown “halloween” staple.

There’s no fire in the film…at all, The tagline is “Evil on a Plane” Even though there isn’t barring about 5 minutes at the VERY end…and even then it’s not so much “Evil” more, a woman sat on a plane thinking menacing thoughts. The whole box art would imply that this was going to be some kind of slasher movie set on an aeroplane, with all the drama that can come with that. Given the pose of the woman on the front of the box and the ample cleavage on display, one could maybe even infer an element of “Basic Instinct” to proceedings. This is not the case.

The back of the box doesnt fair much better. All the imagery of planes? Well..there are shots of airplanes in this movie…stock footage of airplanes. The main image on the back of the box? Is only seen in a 1 second burst as a flashback. The shot of the housekeeper and the FBI agent happen at the VERY end of the film and both are also very brief flashbacks to boot! The shot of the terrified guy in the flat cap? A dream. And the shot of the woman doing a strange sort of “Kissy ” face? Yeah she’s in the film for collectively like…5 minutes and adds nothing really to the plot.

Even the blurb on the back of the box is somewhat misleading as it really emphasizes the plane based nature of this slasher…we only see Anna (our main character) ON a plane for collectively 5-10 minutes, about 5 minutes at the very VERY beginning and about 3-5 minutes at the very VERY end. I’m telling you this because, I dear viewer, found out all too late that this was in fact a terrifically misleading box made up to shift copies and that the actual film? Well. When I tell you that afterwards I went to letterboxed to see what other people made of it and got a barrage of Americans who were in a state of shock, confusion and disappointment because they’d picked it up for $1 at the dollar tree on the grounds of “How bad could it be?” only to find out JUST HOW bad it COULD be… Well I hope you treat this review as the warning I never received for this thing. #Deephurting

The film follows Anna, a cabin crew member on a flight from New York to London who’s fed up of her job, At this point, she’s been through three 7 hour flights this week alone and after a particularly hectic flight in which she was felt up twice, “Accidentally” broke a guys nose and spent a more than significant period of time stopping a girl from throwing up her lower intestine. She’s burnt out, exhausted. And just wants to check into her hotel room for the afternoon and get some sleep.

When Anna gets to the hotel however, the stresses don’t stop there, apart from a slightly letchy flight crew trying to hook up with her, she finds that she’s missing off the booking list and as such hasn’t got a room for the night, after properly kicking off, she eventually DOES get a room. And it’s from here that the film really kind of deteriorates. Because, y’see, this is an ultra low budget film. The film makers basically just booked out a room in a holiday inn (possibly two rooms…) and the rest of the movie really is footage from inside of those rooms. Occasionally at quieter points of the day, they’ve been allowed to film in the bar/restaurant part of the holiday inn, which believe me. Is a treat in this film…

So! She checks in, and… at this point I check out…I don’t quite know how to explain this but we basically spend between 10 and 15 minutes with her as she just checks her room out top to bottom. She goes to the toilet (and doesn’t wipe) burns her hand making a cup of tea when the kettle wasn’t even turned on, she gets a bath (no nudity), texts her fiance Simon, watches TV briefly, goes to sleep, wakes up in the early evening, reads the restaurant menu aloud, gets dressed, goes down to the restaurant, reads the menu AGAIN, orders a steak and chips and a large red wine, heads over to the bar part of the restaurant. Almost gets chatted up by a guy, but catches him before he starts and basically offers him a kiss if he’ll give her his glass of wine and leave her alone (which he does). And then she settles into reading.

And it’s here we meet “John” who catches Annas eye from across the bar, he’s also reading a book and drinking red wine, and he ushers Anna over offering to buy her a drink and have some light conversation, he explains that he’s a software developer who’s recently out of a relationship because he wasn’t ready to start a family. Anna explains that she’s a member of cabin crew and the pair really get on, in fact they get on a little too well…John wants to shag her. The pair drink late into the night and as things wind down, John shoots his shot. Only for Anna (who WOULD if she COULD) to shoot him down because she’s “Taken”. The pair embrace, say their goodnights and Anna heads to bed while John hangs around the bar.

Anna heads back to her room, only to be woken up a couple of hours later by a knock at the door. It’s John, who’s brought an unopened bottle of Champagne and two glasses. Anna opens the door to him and John once again tries to convince her of a shag, she says no and he seems a bit crestfallen, so she invites him in for a drink and to continue the conversation. The film doesn’t give us enough information to know for sure whether Anna was considering cheating, or whether she was just being nice. The fact this scene follows on from a text conversation between Anna and her friend Angela talking about how Angelas going to cheat on her husband with some of the flight crew, kind of implies that Anna has it in mind.

Anyway, John goes in, the door closes, we cut to black and when we fade up a LOT of time has passed. Clothes, glasses and other fodder litter Anna’s floor and Anna slowly but surely wakes up, gets her bearings and starts trying to recover. But it quickly becomes clear something isn’t right. Like…she has a strange red iron tasting liquid all over her clothes, her duvet is sticky and John is lying very still, not breathing and IS FUCKING DEAD.

Anna panics, gets into the shower fully clothed and cries saying “Please god no, not again” implying this has happened before. Annnd…well; the rest of the film is basically just Anna in her hotel room, trying to figure out the best way to get rid of John, this is really where the thriller side of things kicks in as she not only has to get rid of the body, she also has to clean her room up because, well, it’s covered in blood and broken glass, she also has to get rid of all evidence that John was even IN the hotel AND she has to avoid being caught by the various staff of the hotel who seem almost drawn to her room specifically for no reason.

And that’s pretty much the plot, I’d elaborate and give you the blow by blow on exactly what goes down, but; to be honest it quite literally is just Anna cleaning the place up, avoiding staff and figuring out how to get rid of the body. And while the twist ending is passably decent, I won’t spoil it for you here…I want you to suffer as I did. In a yawning 90 minute sprawl, will Anna make it back home scott free? Will John survive being repeatedly stabbed in the chest with a steak knife? And why does this film bother with a cabin crew if they’re only going to have them in a couple of scenes and then bin them off? All this and more will probably be answered if you’re bored and need to kill 90 minutes on Deadheading.

And man oh man I am NOT kidding about the inactivity here, this film is SO dull. Not only do we get 25 minutes of a woman getting off a plane, checking in, having a bath and getting some food to tolerate, but the first “Kill” in this horror thriller doesn’t happen until 40 minutes in and due to either the budget, the risk of damage to property or some other random reason almost all of the blood is pre-stained or CGI. hell; in one shot they actually CG water into a shower head because they didn’t have a waterproof kit bag for their camera. With closeups being covered by a watering can being poured onto her head!

What gore is on display is largely CG, VERY unrealistic and done in VERY short bursts that are quite literally blink and you’ll miss it. And we see almost nothing. All the actual shots of violence, we end up cutting away from, theres one VERY brief shot of a 2nd murder (1 hour and 7 minutes into this 90 minute thing) where someone gets stabbed in the face and threy DO show it! But it’s CG again VERY brief and they mask as much of it as possible with cuts that really diminish its effectiveness.

And because the whole film is told in such a way that we’re jumping around in time, the horror element pretty much doesn’t exist, because…the thing with horror is, it kind of happens “in the moment” and relies on suspense like. You can show horror in a flashback, that’s fine as long as its self-contained. But showing us something horrible, then flashing back to show how that horrible thing happened, then flashing forward again to the horrible thing, doesnt really work because once you’ve seen the horrible thing, cutting back to show (or in the case of this film not even show…IMPLY) what happened just means that you’ve undercut your own chance for terror and suspense. And with that gone, all you’re really left with is a woman wandering around a hotel room, touching things and cleaning for an hour.

Im gonna sound like such a horror “bro” here, but fuck it. i’d have been able to overlook the total lack of gore or horror had their at least been some nudity or even a sex scene thrown in just so that SOMETHING happened in that first 50 minutes of the films runtime.

So…if this horror thriller has only the absolute barest amount of horror, no nudity for the “Steamy” factor and barely anything resembling suspense. What does it have? Well…not a great lot. The script is frankly dull as dishwater, theres a 3 act structure thats clearly defined with act 1 being everything from the beginning up to the murder of John, Act 2 being everything from Anna waking up and finding John Dead up to the point where she finally settles on her method for getting rid of him, and Act 3 being a bit shorter than the other 2 acts and basically comprising of her doing the plan to get rid of the evidence and the big final act plot twists leading into the credits.

The problem is, the pacing of those first 2 acts, while consistent in the sense that they both run to around about the same length, contain SO much padding to the point that I think anyone with their head screwed on will likely switch off after half an hour. The first act runs to roughly 40 minutes and I feel honestly it could have run to 20 and have done what it needed to do in terms of explaining what’s going on more than comfortably, and even then that would’ve been a quite dull 20 minutes. But it would have been 20 minutes less of the interminable boringness we ended up with. The only real point of interest in this opening act is Anna meeting John and Johns murder. Pretty much everything else could be lost with no real loss to the overall plot.

The 2nd act runs to about 30 minutes and again, it could’ve EASILY been halved and still felt padded. I’m not joking, this is the only film I’ve seen where the lead actress has a bath and 2-3 showers in less than an hour and 5 minutes. There are times in this script where I feel like it was written IN THE HOTEL ROOM and the crew were just sitting around looking for things they could get their lead actress to do using only what was available.

What I will say though (and this is pretty much the only nice thing I CAN say about this movie) the 3rd act does at least pick up the pace a little bit, and the final 20 minutes, while bloated, are decent enough and manage to get things up to a pace where I didn’t want to claw my own eyeballs out. But it’s all too little too late. If the reward for 70 minutes of patience is 20 minutes of lukewarm plot resolution that AT BEST is just about “acceptable” (in my opinion I might add) that is not a Job well done, that’s a failure.

I think this could have been a half decent 40-45 minute short film. Chopping out the superfluous scenes, really trimming the fat down, this could easily jump from a stinker of a picture to something I’d be tempted to watch again. But because anything less than feature run time doesn’t sell, we end up with this. A short film that doesn’t know what to do with itself, so it burns time until it can do what it needs to. I don’t think I’m expressing myself clearly enough here when I say that this thing was SO dull, SO dull…it was SO dull it actually made me appreciate what an hour and a half really feels like. like…REALLY feels like. I can’t sugar coat it.

Additionally; none of the characters are particularly endearing or likable. I’m not saying every film has to have a likable main character, but it does kind of help the audience empathize with them a bit more if they have SOME level of emotional connection. Even if their a bastard, WE as the audience need to care if they live or die. And we just don’t have that with our cast here. All the characters are written to be generally unlikeable people. Whether it’s John being manipulative and, in places, a bit rapey. Or Anna swinging wildly between the script wanting us to sympathize with her, only to then have her basically bully people, mock them, be overly sarcastic and just generally unpleasant. I never fully knew where I stood with the cast in this thing, and while that sometimes can be used to great success in setting suspense and unease. Here, it just made me fundamentally lose investment in anyone involved because they were so all over the place I didn’t know who to invest in.

On a closing note, I have to say the dialogues…not great. It’s a bit stilted, VERY repetitious and again, much like the actual happenings in the film, a lot of it just kind of exists to get us from point to point as slowly as possible. And that does have a detrimental impact on the characters. Y’see with short films the expectation on character establishment and development is relatively low. Mainly because, there isn’t a lot of time to establish your characters, so it works best to introduce them, breadcrumb some info about them across the narrative and then use that breadcrumbed info to give your character either a problem they have to solve or a solution based on what they know or who they are.

Feature films have a MUCH higher scope in terms of setting up character development both in terms of who they are, where they come from, what they believe and there’s a lot of emphasis in features to make your characters grow, learn and develop throughout. Now…Anna as a character would work in a short film because, when we’re introduced to her at the start of the film, there IS a little something extra going on up there personality wise. Which could act as a good mask to hide her more “Homicidal” tendencies. It would, up front, allow the audience to feel like there was something not quite right with her and would have kept things fairly nippy, so when the “John is dead ” reveal happens the audience can go “OH! SHE’S A BAD’UN!” and feel smart that they could sense something wasn’t quite right earlier on with her.

But in this elongated format we spend too much time with Anna just kind of, being normal. It means when the more psychotic moments do come out. It’s jarring, but not jarring in a “OH! She’s a baddie!” way…jarring in a “Why is she doing this? She’s just been messaging her fiance telling him how much she misses him and now she’s stabbing a guy in a hotel room…” way. And I think as well, the fact that the other characters in this film AREN’T developed nearly as much as they kind of need to be creates problems too. Like, John gets a meaty bit of screen time to develop himself, and I actually feel like I know more about him than Anna honestly, but he still doesn’t quite feel right and he exits the film with me feeling like there was more planned for him to do, that ultimately never got worked out.

Angela and the rest of the cabin crew are another example. They REALLY didn’t need to be in this. Like; either develop them properly and have them in the film, or cut them out. Because this weird hokey cokey business where Angela ISN’T in the majority of the film, but keeps popping up randomly via text and at one point appears to literally just use angelas toilet as a moment of artificial suspense? Yeahhh it doesn’t work for me. Either involve her and have her be another of Anna’s victims, or better yet have her help Anna in hiding the body. Or chop her out, because in this format, she’s not needed.

The script was written, directed, produced and edited by David Easton, he’s a bit of an auteur in that sense, having 5 directing credits and 3 writing credits. And of those 5 directing credits 2 are unreleased and of the 3 writing credits, 1 is unreleased. Deadheading is probably his best known credit and, as of the time of recording, it’s also his last directing and writing credit.

On the direction front, to me? It’s frustrating because it HAS no curation. Everything is presented in painful detail, it all looks very flat and because the location is a hotel room, and a lot of the budget hotels tend to try and keep things minimalist and uniform it means we spend a lot of time in rooms that all look vaguely the same, with very little of interest to help add definition to the back of shots…literally 90% of the backgrounds in this thing are of white walls or the bed. You may think that 10-15 minutes of exploring a hotel room isn’t *REALLY* that long of a time. but I can assure you, when you’ve sat through Anna touching light switches, opening cupboards entering and exiting the bathroom MULTIPLE times, with NONE of this being relevant to the plot, largely in silence. it’s insufferable..

The idea of a director is to curate all the elements that help to make a film work and to do so in a way that ACTUALLY makes the film work. That’s why directors are so often lauded. Here? They’ve seemingly decided to go for a better safe than sorry approach and they’ve just documented EVERYTHING. Presumably so they’d have more to play around with in the edit. But because they’ve been SO cavalier in just grabbing everything, it’s kind of meant there’s no solid steerage on presentation. We just…see everything. In places it may as well be raw rushes for all the curation we have. And that’s a problem, because if your film doesn’t really have the sense of purposeful driving towards a point, it’s meandering, and when that happens…people turn off.

Direction of the cast, was…actually not too bad. In fact I’d say that side of things DOES work in this film’s favor, the cast all seem switched on, in the zone and I think the director does a good job of talking them through their scenes and what needs to happen. They seem to bring a bit of themselves to the role as well, which is always a nice touch. Had the film been a tighter product the direction of the cast would have shined through even more so than it already does and probably would have been its saving grace.

The Cine reeks of “Student film” vibes. What I mean by that is that student films (or early attempts at filmmaking from people still learning the craft) tend to (understandably) not be quite as confident in their delivery. This is because the filmmaker hasnt found their “Voice” or style yet, and their are some common tropes that generally befall these kinds of movies…One of those tropes is hardcore ‘Shot stuffing’ when sequence building. A common practice where a sequence that should really only need 2-3 shots to convey what’s happening (for example; someone notices there mobile phone is ringing, they go over and answer the call) will instead be illustrated with 5-10 shots all VERY quickly cut together with “Match cutting” to try and show off how good at continuity and shot listing they are.

This film has TONS of examples of that, moments where a scene that should take no more than 10 shots to do from beginning to end, ends up taking anywhere between 25-35 shots that cut every 3-5 seconds or so. It’s disorienting and while it IS impressive that they’re able to deal with match cuts like that. It’s annoying, and ultimately adds nothing to proceedings. The secret to a good edit is to only cut where necessary. You want your audience to flow through your story and cuts are designed to help tell that story in ways that acting, cinematography and direction simply can’t do. Cutting at an epilepsy inducing rate because you have a lot of shots of someone going to the toilet and boy howdy do you wanna use them! Help’s no one. It just subconsciously makes the audience wonder why we need to see someone taking a shit from 5 different angles.

Shallow depth of field isn’t really used as much as I’d have expected, but I don’t know if that’s down to them not having the lenses to pull off a convincing shallow pull, or whether it’s because the cameras they had didn’t have the ability to soft focus. To me it looks like low end DSLR footage, possibly even domestic camcorder given the year this came out. Composition is largely fair standing, nothing breathtakingly good, they largely follow the basic rules of composition (off centering, the rule of thirds, the line, blocking etc) but it’s all a bit uninspired and some shots just look downright ugly. For example; the shots of the hotel room on the ultra wide angle lens, where it looks like they haven’t “Defisheyed ” it, or cutaway shots like when Anna makes a cup of tea where it’s underexposed, shakey and unpleasant.

All this combined with a lackluster color grade which, does at least TRY to make the film look a bit stylized but ultimately looks mostly washed out and untreated, even with some snazzy lighting kits and gels for added effect. It just…doesn’t look or feel quite as powerful as I feel it could and when combined with the above issues only exacerbated things further.

Performance wise, well…there’s only really two people to talk about and that’s Lisa Ronaghan and Bryan Larkin. Mainly because all the other cast members who turn up in this thing are barely in the movie and when they do, they’re not great…but hey, we’ve all gotta start somewhere. Lisa’s performance is fine, she does an acceptable turn as a leading lady in a “Horror” film. There are a few awkward deliveries here and there which I can put down to her putting on an American accent (she’s british) but, it’s a damn decent attempt at an American Accent (at least to my ears) it was convincing enough that I only found out she was actually british when I started collecting notes for this movie and found her demo reel. Her physical performance is a bit of a mixed bag, but I think she does about enough to carry the film, which given how bare it is, is quite impressive.

As for Bryan. He’s…okay. He gives a bit of a muted performance, and while that might work in certain circumstances, here? It just kind of makes him come across as a bit aloof, and as such he never really gets a moment to properly define his character. So he just sort of, gets through his bits decently enough and then exits. What I WILL say is the man can’t drunk act. He just can’t. He tries! But he just comes across as giving the same muted performance as when he was sober…just slower talking and more flailing. Sooo…yeh. It’s not a winner for me.

And finally; the soundtrack! It’s completely unremarkable. To the point that, in trying to remember it for the purpose of this review I had to go back to my notes and even after briefing up on my notes, I’m STILL none the wiser. I seem to recall it basically being drone noise. Occasionally punctuated with the odd spooky synth sting. which…I suppose being unmemorable in some regards is better than being bad. But it’s still not great when I couldn’t even hum you a bar from this thing.

Deadheading was released on DVD in 2018 by Echobridge acquisition corporation. It’s as barebones as it comes, just the film and a menu and that’s it. The Picture quality is fine enough. As far as I can see this is a US only release, it’s on streaming in the UK but I can’t find a UK physical release anywhere. Which I find quite funny, that a film that’s shot in the UK, Largely in a UK hotel with an all UK cast only got a physical release in the US and even THEN it only got a release in the US to populate Dollar stores and traumatize trash divers like myself. Eesh.

While I’d stop short of calling Deadheading one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. It is VERY hard to like this thing, from the script being bloated and stretched WELL beyond its natural run time, to all the main characters being largely unlikeable, to disorienting editing and flat lifeless cine and direction that largely feels like every scrap was used rather than the choicest cuts. This was an endurance test to sit through. When I can confidently say this film is basically Barry J. Gillis’s “Things” but somehow LESS endearing, less interesting and even MORE pointless…I hope I convey my absolute dislike of this thing. And the fact it has such potential to be so much better is the thing that hurts the most.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/dead-heading/1/