The Friday Fright Nights feature you can watch for free this week is the supernatural horror film Dead Mary, starring Dominique Swain
A full Free Movie of the Day is posted on the JoBlo Horror Movies YouTube channel every day of the week – but on Fridays things get even freakier and a little more fun. Get your weekend started the right way by indulging in Friday Fright Nights! Every Friday, we’ll be taking a look at another genre movie you can watch in its entirety, free of charge, either on the YouTube channel linked above or in the video embed here.
The Friday Fright Night feature we have for you this week is the 2007 supernatural horror film Dead Mary, starring Dominique Swain – an actress I always expected to have a more high profile career than she has had up to this point. She got a lot of attention when she first appeared on screens in Lolita and Face/Off back in 1997, but she hasn’t done many big movies since then, with the biggest probably being Alpha Dog in 2006. But while the projects she works on may not be flashy attention-grabbers, Swain does work all the time: in fact, she’s about to cross the 100 screen credit mark. Among those credits: Happy Campers, Tart, JAG, Nazis at the Center of the Earth, Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre, The Wrong Roommate, A Doggone Christmas, A Husband for Christmas, The Fast and the Fierce, The Black Room, A Doggone Adventure, Rottentail, Minutes to Midnight, The Wrong Cruise, The Wrong Teacher, The Wrong Mommy, The Wrong Mr. Right, and Obsessed with the Babysitter. And yes, I have seen several of those movies. Lifetime’s Wrong franchise is a guilty pleasure of mine.
Dead Mary is a solid entry in Swain’s filmography, with a set-up that will be immediately familiar to genre fans. (It’s another one of those “friends stir up trouble at a cabin in the woods” movies, sort of a mid-’00s Evil Dead.) What I really like about it is that it takes its time getting around to bringing the horror elements into the picture.
I’m a big proponent of the idea that not every horror movie needs to have an opening kill or an opening scare. I think more movies could benefit from building up to the horror. Dead Mary gets off to a nicely low-key start. The first couple minutes are simply Swain sitting in a car by herself, killing time. Then we follow her to the cabin in the woods, where we get to know the other characters through dialogue scenes as they chat about their personal lives. Around 30 minutes have gone by before it becomes clear where the horror is going to come from. And by then, we’re eager to see just how horrific things are going to get.
Directed by Robert Wilson from a screenplay by Peter Sheldrick and Christopher Warre Smets, Dead Mary has the following synopsis:
Kim and her boyfriend Matt have just broken up, but they travel together to a cottage nearby a lake to spend the weekend with their friends Eve, Dash and his wife Amber and Baker and his new girlfriend Lily. The atmosphere becomes heavy with the situation between Kim and Matt, and one of them suggests them to play “Dead Mary”. Matt, Eve and Dash summon the evil witch repeating her name three times in front of a mirror with a candle. Along the night, Matt hears weird noises, is killed and returns to life, while part of the group is possessed by the fiend. Without knowing who is possessed, the rest of the group fights to survive.
Swain is joined in the cast by Marie Josée Colburn, Steve McCarthy, Maggie Castle, Michael Majeski, Reagan Pasternak, and Jefferson Brown.
Dead Mary was the second feature for Wilson, following the 2006 sci-fi horror movie Warriors of Terra. In the years since making Dead Mary, Wilson has gone on to primarily work in television, directing episodes of shows like Us Weekly’s Famous Feuds, Haunted Case Files, and Untold Stories of the ER, as well as the mini-series The Civil War: Brothers Divided. He has also directed the thriller You Bury Your Own and co-directed the action comedy I Declare War with Jason Lapeyre. This was the only writing credit for Peter Sheldrick, but Smets has also written or co-written the sci-fi action movie Cyborg Soldier, the action movie The Last Hit Man, the horror films Living Death and The Mad, and the drama The Overlookers, which he also directed.
So take a look at Dead Mary – after all, it’s free! – and let us know what you thought of it by leaving a comment below or on the YouTube page. What did you think of the build-up to the horror… and did you think the payoff was worth the wait?
Originally published at https://www.joblo.com/friday-fright-nights-dead-mary/
