A mentally handicapped young man lives with his older brother. The older sibling has guilt in that he was responsible for an incident leading to his brother's condition. One day he buys him a large antique mirror which unfortunately turns out to be an evil artefact that talks to the little brother from another dimension, imploring him to commit horrendous acts.
Quite amazingly, this movie was filmed over a period of fifteen years, which is a huge time period to focus on one project and which is not really at all obvious from the finished film. The director was Andrew Getty who was one of the heirs to the Getty family fortune, this allowed him to plough millions of his own money into the film but he seems to have been a troubled individual and ended up dying before the film was released. If I'm being totally honest, I'm not sure the end results justify the huge amount of time that was invested in this project. It certainly has some good Lovecraftian imagination at times, with some imaginative macabre imagery and creatures but I felt it was held back somewhat by the central performance of Frederick Koehler as the disturbed brother, who I found quite grating throughout. The story in general is okay but not especially remarkable, the strengths of this one lie mainly with some of its visual ideas which are often successfully surreal and nightmarish. On the whole, there are some worthwhile ideas interwoven into this one but I thought it to be a bit uneven on the whole.
Quite amazingly, this movie was filmed over a period of fifteen years, which is a huge time period to focus on one project and which is not really at all obvious from the finished film. The director was Andrew Getty who was one of the heirs to the Getty family fortune, this allowed him to plough millions of his own money into the film but he seems to have been a troubled individual and ended up dying before the film was released. If I'm being totally honest, I'm not sure the end results justify the huge amount of time that was invested in this project. It certainly has some good Lovecraftian imagination at times, with some imaginative macabre imagery and creatures but I felt it was held back somewhat by the central performance of Frederick Koehler as the disturbed brother, who I found quite grating throughout. The story in general is okay but not especially remarkable, the strengths of this one lie mainly with some of its visual ideas which are often successfully surreal and nightmarish. On the whole, there are some worthwhile ideas interwoven into this one but I thought it to be a bit uneven on the whole.