FrightFest review – Dead Reset
The die-and-start-over computer game format pre-exists computer games by some years – if anyone ever films Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon (1960), the internet will dismiss it as a ripoff of the many stories which have copped from it – but the crossover first became apparent with Groundhog Day, a film not based on a computer game but informed by the structure of play and inspired by that narrative device to deliver what was then an original take on A Christmas Carol.
Dead Reset, by FrightFest regular Stewart Sparke (The Creature Below, Book of Monster, How to Kill Monsters), is a film of Sparke’s own game – which feels like a VHS era quickie cash-in … it relates to, say, Edge of Tomorrow the way Forbidden World does to Alien. It’s fast, grimy, intense, not a little silly, and turns a film school into a deep-level (or deep-space?) base with hanging polythene, repurposed dead tech (either it’s set in the 1980s or VDU monitors and videotapes are going to come back into use in the near future) and wonky airlocks. If you’re wistful for the era when James Cameron stapled silver-sprayed fast food containers to walls to create a spaceship corridor, then Dead Reset ticks all the boxes.
Cole (Daniel Thrace), a surgeon, judders to life with no memory of his past until the moment when killer goon Slade (Dennis Rasaq) grabs him by the lapels and chilly scientist Magson (Andrina Carroll) – a graduate of the Dr Carrington Save-the-Monster/Sacrifice-the-People School of Advanced Temporal Tinkering and Bilogical Anomalies – orders him to remove a foreign body from an anaesthetised patient. He gets killed, often by Slade, several times before he has the breath to explain that he’s in a timeloop – and that he knows if he cuts into the patient, a tentacular critter will get loose and murder everyone in the room … assistant Fearne (Lyndsey Craine), psychiatrist Weir (Andrew Dunn) and techie Cooper (Michaela Longdon). It’s a clever fillip that no matter how many times the scenario plays out, people keep tripping over the same bloody bit of kit on the floor.
Because of some chrono-synclastic side-effect related to a dentist’s chair – Magson says it’s a simplification to call it a time machine – the point of reset advances every so often, and people who got killed on the lower level are out of the picture permanently … but the plot also advances and the monster gets bigger on the xenomorph pattern, though the shambling killer Michelin Man harks back to the look of some Outer Limits bears and the DIY aesthetic not only of Roger Corman but Doctor Who. A few emotional connections get made – Fearne has a reason to be upset by the latest experiment – and there are periodic revelations about where they are, how they got there and even who Cole is, though there’s no time to stop for anything too deep so any thorny issues about the responsibilities which come with a reset are hurried over in order to get to the next squelchy confrontation (by killing himself, Cole could go back and have multiple goes at saving everyone – but he mostly avoids that).
The character interplay is functional and Sparke edits frenetically, covering for the fact that this mostly takes place in very few cramped rooms and working the repetition inherent in much low-budget SF (another bloody monster chase through corridors!) into the plot.
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