The biggest problem with going to horror conventions is that people will try to stick you with independent films that they've been involved with, many of which are so bad you wouldn't look at them twice if you saw them in a video store. I don't know how anyone else handles it but with me, I try to be as gracious as I can to these people because I know it's probably really hard to make independent films, let alone get them seen by someone. At the same convention where I ended up with The Prodigy, a guy at one table first tried to sell me a copy of Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door but I told him I had no interest in seeing a movie that sadistically cruel. When I went up to the table another day to talk with a friend of mine who was sitting there, the same guy gave me a copy of this movie Headspace and even signed it (I don't even think he was in it or had anything to do with it). He gave it to me for free so I couldn't complain. When I get stuck with independent movies like this, I feel obligated to at least try to watch them because it might turn out to be decent. But that wasn't the case with this movie.
The movie is about a 25-year old guy named Alex Borden who suffered a horrible tragedy when he was a kid but has grown up to be rather intelligent. One day, he engages in a chess match with a person and loses. However, after the match, his intellect begins to grow dramatically. He also starts having painful headaches and bizarre hallucinations. As he seeks therapy for his condition, a series of gruesome murders begins to happen all over the city and Alex wonders if he is responsible somehow.
I will give this movie one thing: the concept, that knowing everything may not be something you want, does have potential. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't do anything compelling with it. It's a lame psychological thriller with bits of a monster movie thrown in and neither of the elements work that well. The pacing is slow and boring, the characters are uninteresting, and the revelation is stupid and makes no sense. I can appreciate a slow build, as I've mentioned before, but if the road to get there is not engaging and the payoff is dumb, it's not worth it.
One of my problems with this movie is that it's one of those independent horror movies like Hatchet that brags about having many beloved genre stars in the cast but they're basically just cameos and meant to sucker in fans. You've got Olivia Hussey as Dr. Karen Murphy, the psychiatrist who treats Alex; William Atherton as Dr. Ira Gold, an alcoholic physician who's the first victim; Sean Young as Alex's mother in a flashback who apparently loses her mind and gets blown away by Alex's father; Mark Margolis as Boris Pavlovsky, a Russian scientist who was part of a Moscow science survey that studied people like Alex; Dee Wallace as Dr. Denise Bell, the doctor who recommends Alex to Dr. Murphy; and Udo Kier as Rev. Karl Hartman, a priest who Alex comes to as a last resort. Since these people are veteran actors, their performances aren't that bad but, as I said, their presence is meant to just to lure in genre fans and every time I see an independent film do this, I can't help but groan.
The film's lead, Alex, is played by Christopher Denham. A big rule of any movie is that if your lead isn't interesting at all, the movie won't work and for me, that's the problem with Denham. Mind you, I don't think he's horrible but he's just bland. In a featurette on the DVD (which I tried to watch but after this movie, I'd had enough), Olivia Hussey said that Denham has a lot of charisma. More than likely she was just saying that because she needed to and I hope so because Denham has no charisma whatsoever. He tries to act all tortured and fragile but it comes off as he's just going through the motions. We do see a little bit of likability in him at the beginning before this weird stuff starts happening to him but it's so brief that I don't feel that it allows us to empathize with him and care about him. Again, his performance isn't terrible but it's just not interesting.
The other actors aren't that memorable either. Harry, the chess player whom Alex frequently plays with and triggers the events (I honestly can't find the name of the actor) is even more bland than Alex himself. He's revealed at the end to be Alex's older brother, who was separated from him when they were children. This could have been a big revelation but the character was just so uninteresting with his screaming and bad attitude beforehand that I didn't care. Paul Sparks as Alex's friend Jason is kind of likable and funny, coming across as a sort of stoner type, but there's not much else to say about him. I did get a chuckle out of Patrick Wang's character Sammy Chung, even if he was an over the top stereotype of gay guy. I found his friend, Lloyd (again, I cannot find the actor's name), to be funny as well but I can't help but wonder why an old black guy would hang around a young, gay Asian. Maybe he's gay too? Who knows?
The big revelation is that the evil creatures that are haunting Alex and committing the murders are ancient evil spirits who seek out people with enormous amounts of knowledge. You find out that they need two such people to come together to act as conduits for them to enter reality. Alex and Harry being together as children is what caused them apparently possess their mother and make her attack them. They were separated so that it wouldn't happen again but now that they've unknowingly been reunited, the monsters are able to once again enter the real world and cause havoc. The way the monsters come through are sporadic and inconsistent. As I said, they apparently possessed the mother at the beginning of the film and forced her to try to kill everyone. A sign that someone is in danger of being attacked by the monsters when Alex is around is when their face begins bleeding. You also find out that anyone who touches Alex is in danger of being killed. But here's what's confusing. When Alex is around said person, they begin to act possessed, the monsters speak through them, and, as is the case with the reverend, are eventually killed. This is presented as something only Alex can see and the persons themselves aren't aware of it. But the monsters also attack people who have touched Alex even when he's nowhere around. They don't act possessed because Alex isn't there to see it. That I can kind of buy. However, there's a hole in this part of the plot. At the beginning with the mother, the father was trying to get the boys away from her because she had a knife and really was trying to kill them. The father even tells her, "It's not really you." So he can see that she's possessed? Did he pass on this curse to the boys? And the monsters apparently took her over completely because she lunges at the father with knives, forcing hhim to shoot her. They never do that to anyone else in the movie, whether Alex is around or not. Why? It's just completely inconsistent and poorly executed.
As for the monsters themselves when you finally see them at the end of the movie, they just look weird. They look like scaly-skinned demons with pig noses which makes me unable to take them seriously. Sure, they make a lot of threatening growls and roars and when they're creeping around in the darkness, it is kind of eerie. But this is one instance where they shouldn't have revealed the monsters. If they'd only left me with brief glimpses of them, the movie have been all the more effective. If you can't come up with a good enough monster, just don't show it. That's my view on these things. That said, the killings that the monsters commit are well done makeup effects-wise. When Sean Young's character is killed at the beginning, the father blows an enormous hole in the left side of her head which is impressive. There's a similar well done effect when Dr. Gold is killed, with his face all slashed up. The other effects are standard, like a demon hand slashing through Udo Kier's torso but they are well done. I will give the movie that.
It may seem like with first The Prodigy and now Headspace that I'm just picking on independent filmmakers and I'm honestly not. I have no problem with people trying to make movies with no money (heck, John Carpenter did that with Halloween and he ended up creating a classic). It's just that these movies are bad examples of independent films, as there are for any type of movie. Just because a movie was made with little money and no studio backing doesn't automatically mean you have to like it. To be honest, watching this movie was excruciating for me. It's only 89 minutes long but feels like three hours because it's so slow and uninteresting. Stuart Gordon of Re-Animator fame seems to really like it and that's cool but to me, Headspace just isn't worth the headache it causes.
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