When Nick West (Jason Statham lookalike Andrew Howard) and his slutty girlfriend Sammy (Pollyanna Rose) decide to explore an abandoned insane asylum, they discover a bizarre looking chair and use it as a prop for a spot of acid-fuelled sex. But as the couple begin to go at it, their pleasurable experience turns into a nightmare: the chair—actually a portal to a hellish realm inhabited by a rapacious tentacled demon—traps Sammy, impales her with metal spikes and tendrils, and then whisks her body away.
Unable to adequately explain his girlfriend's disappearance, West is declared criminally insane and spends four years residing in a mental hospital, after which he is eventually released into the care of Dr. Willard (David Gant), who, along with assistant Melissa (Louise Griffiths) and psychiatry students Brett (Matt Berry) and Rachel (Elize du Toit), unwisely takes his patient back to the scene of the crime to face his demons.
According to the opening waffle from West, his story will be worth our while, but as the film ultimately reveals, he's not a man to be trusted: The Devil's Chair is a massive waste of time.
After over an hour spent building a fairly intriguing story around the premise of a supernatural chair, writer/director Adam Mason attempts to pull the rug from under the viewer's feet in the film's closing moments by revealing that virtually nothing that we have seen has actually happened, but has instead only taken place in the warped mind of Mr. West.
It's a hackneyed, over-used plot device from a director desperate to make sense of his very muddled movie; matters are made all the more irritating thanks to the smug nature of the script, which positively delights in the fact that us horror fans have once again been shafted by a film-maker with no ideas of his own (even his visual style is trite and unimaginative, with an over-use of nasty editing techniques—particularly freeze-frame).
As well as displaying utter contempt for his intended audience, Mason also fails to deliver on a more superficial level: the movie's supposedly ultra-graphic outcome is quite bereft of satisfyingly nasty gore (there's loads of blood, but the film shies away from showing us too much juicy detail); and rather inexcusably, neither busty ex-Hollyoaks babe Elize du Toit nor tasty brunette Louise Griffiths get nekkid (du Toit strips down to her bra, but reveals nothing she hadn't already shown in the Sunday morning soap).
When all is said and done, however, I should probably thank Adam Mason for making The Devil's Chair: now, rather than waste my time explaining exactly what it is that I loathe about much of today's horror output, I can simply point in the direction of this film and say 'there you go'.
Unable to adequately explain his girlfriend's disappearance, West is declared criminally insane and spends four years residing in a mental hospital, after which he is eventually released into the care of Dr. Willard (David Gant), who, along with assistant Melissa (Louise Griffiths) and psychiatry students Brett (Matt Berry) and Rachel (Elize du Toit), unwisely takes his patient back to the scene of the crime to face his demons.
According to the opening waffle from West, his story will be worth our while, but as the film ultimately reveals, he's not a man to be trusted: The Devil's Chair is a massive waste of time.
After over an hour spent building a fairly intriguing story around the premise of a supernatural chair, writer/director Adam Mason attempts to pull the rug from under the viewer's feet in the film's closing moments by revealing that virtually nothing that we have seen has actually happened, but has instead only taken place in the warped mind of Mr. West.
It's a hackneyed, over-used plot device from a director desperate to make sense of his very muddled movie; matters are made all the more irritating thanks to the smug nature of the script, which positively delights in the fact that us horror fans have once again been shafted by a film-maker with no ideas of his own (even his visual style is trite and unimaginative, with an over-use of nasty editing techniques—particularly freeze-frame).
As well as displaying utter contempt for his intended audience, Mason also fails to deliver on a more superficial level: the movie's supposedly ultra-graphic outcome is quite bereft of satisfyingly nasty gore (there's loads of blood, but the film shies away from showing us too much juicy detail); and rather inexcusably, neither busty ex-Hollyoaks babe Elize du Toit nor tasty brunette Louise Griffiths get nekkid (du Toit strips down to her bra, but reveals nothing she hadn't already shown in the Sunday morning soap).
When all is said and done, however, I should probably thank Adam Mason for making The Devil's Chair: now, rather than waste my time explaining exactly what it is that I loathe about much of today's horror output, I can simply point in the direction of this film and say 'there you go'.