Movies That Suck: Headspace (2005)

One of the pitfalls of going to horror conventions is that, odds are, there will be people there trying to push and sell independent films they've been involved and, if you let them, they'll attempt to stick you with a copy, even if they have to give it to you for free. Getting free stuff may not sound like something to complain about, but the catch is that most of these independent horror flicks are so bad that you wouldn't look at them twice if you saw them in a video store. Many don't have a high degree of tolerance for being hassled like this and will let these people know from the get-go that they don't appreciate their shoving this stuff in their face. Being someone who doesn't like conflict, I try to be as gracious as I can, mainly because I know that it's really hard to make independent films, let alone get them seen by someone. But that's also led to me being saddled with some stuff that I would've been happy to go my entire life without seeing. Case in point, Texas Frightmare Weekend in Dallas, 2011, where I ended up with not one but two independent movies that I did not care for whatsoever. One was The Prodigy, a low-grade action movie that someone randomly handed me a copy of while I was waiting in line. The other came after a guy at one table initially tried to sell me a copy of Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door, even telling me how horrific the violence in it was, but I told him that now knowing how sadistically cruel it was ensured that I would never see it. When I went up to the same table another day, in order to talk with a mutual acquaintance who was sitting there (actor Sean Bridgers who, it turns out, went to the same high school as me, St. Andrews in Sewanee), the same guy gave me a free copy of Headspace, and even signed it (he must've been part of the distribution company, because he wasn't in the movie). Just like when somebody gives me something as a gift or lets me borrow them, when I get stuck with independent movies like this, I feel obligated to at least try to watch them, because you never know. Some of them could turn out to be decent or even a gem; that was not the case with Headspace. While the basic concept is an interesting one, and takes some inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft, the execution doesn't work at all. It's mostly a lame psychological thriller, with little bits of monster and gory slasher thrown in, and none of these elements gel together that well. It also doesn't help that the pacing is slow, most of the characters aren't that interesting or likable, the various cameo appearances by genre favorites don't amount to much, and the revelations about what's going on are really hard to understand.

On their oldest son's tenth birthday, the Borden family suffers a horrible and unexpected tragedy. Mrs. Borden's nose suddenly begins bleeding when she goes to cut the cake, and later that afternoon, her two young sons enter her room to find that she's brutalized the family dog. And then, that night, the boys' father wakes them up and leads them outside to the truck, pursued by their mother, who has apparently gone insane. In the end, Mr. Borden is forced to kill his wife by shooting her through the head. Years later, Alex Borden is 25 and lives by himself in New York. Though very intelligent, he suffers from constant migraines. One day, he engages in a chess match in the park with a man named Harry Jellinek. He loses the match, but is inspired to read up on chess strategies for a possible rematch. That night, while talking with his friend Jason, Alex collapses from one of his headaches. He's taken to the hospital, where Dr. Ira Gold discovers that his frontal lobe is much more active than normal. When he regains consciousness, he and the doctors realize his intelligence is growing exponentially, as he's now able to absorb a book's entire contents by just flipping through it, can easily answer complex mathematical problems, and even knows things that he shouldn't. Dr. Denise Bell refers Alex to Dr. Karen Murphy, whom she says has done research that could help him. He starts seeing Karen as a therapy patient, and Karen documents his progress as research for a book she's writing. At the same time, Alex is intent on having a chess rematch with Harry, even following him back to his apartment; again, Alex loses. And soon, a series of gruesome murders begins to happen across the city, to people whom Alex has encountered in one way or another, while he himself begins having visions of monstrous figures. As the body count mounts and his psychological well-being crumbles, Alex wonders if he himself is somehow responsible for the murders.

Headspace was the feature directorial debut of New York native, Andrew van den Houten, who'd previously made a short film called Inherent Darkness and Enlightenment. (He also has a cameo in the movie as an EMT.) His only feature directing credit is a 2009 film called Offspring, based on a Jack Ketchum book (and like Headspace, it wasn't that well-received and has a very low IMDB rating). Speaking of which, van den Houten was also a producer on The Girl Next Door, one of nearly sixty features and short films he's been involved with since 2002. That's where he's been most successful, although few of his producing credits have really good IMDB ratings, either, despite his info page there claiming that his work has been acclaimed by Roger Ebert and Stephen King.

The film's protagonist, Alex Borden, is played by Christopher Denham, an actor who has actually gone on to appear in a number of noteworthy movies, often in supporting roles, like Shutter Island, Argo, Money Monster, and Oppenheimer; he also co-starred with George Clooney in a Broadway production of Good Night and Good Luck. I'm bringing this up because, both when I first saw Headspace and when I watched it again recently, I never found his performance as Alex Borden to be that interesting. In a making of featurette on the DVD (which I tried to watch but, after the ordeal of sitting through the movie itself, I'd had more than enough), Olivia Hussey said that Denham had a lot of charisma. If she was being sincere, and not just saying that because she felt she needed to, I don't know where she got that. Mind you, I don't think Denham is horrible, but for the most part, he's just bland. Granted, as the lead, there's a lot riding on his shoulders, as he has to make Alex come off as a brilliant but tortured and fragile loner, one who suffers from constant migraines and then, suddenly, finds he now literally absorbs information at a mere glance, can solve complex problems within an instant, and even knows and hears stuff he shouldn't be able to. Rather than reveling in it, he becomes increasingly disturbed and freaked out by it, especially since his headaches seem to be getting worse, and because he begins having visions of monstrous beings, one of which literally marks him during an apparent nightmare. Alex even feels that he may be responsible for the gruesome murders that are happening. And to add even more to his anguish, the supposed experts around him seem to be more interested in studying him rather than helping him. 

But, it mostly feels like Denham is going through the motions, even in the big, emotional scenes. And it doesn't help that, while not loathsome, Alex isn't a person I find easy to empathize with. We do see a little bit of likability in him at the beginning, before this weird stuff starts happening to him, like in his first chess game with Harry Jellinek and when Jason visits him while he's house-sitting, but he seems to have kind of an emo vibe about him, especially with those black-painted fingernails. I know this is going to sound judgemental, but stuff like that just turns me

off in general. And he's also something of a perv, as he spies on Jason and his wife, Stacy, having sex in one scene, even having a beer while watching, as if it's his own private peepshow..Thus, as the movie goes on, and Alex gets more and more desperate, I find myself not really caring what happens, despite his ultimate fate being quite grim, albeit irritatingly ambiguous.

While he doesn't have that many scenes, Harry Jellinek (Erick Kastel) is a significant character, in that his meeting and playing chess with Alex seemingly triggers the story's events.  After losing to him the first time, Alex becomes obsessed with boning up on chess and playing him until he wins. He's so obsessed that, when Harry initially rebuffs his desire for a rematch, he follows him back to his apartment. Though initially annoyed by this, Harry allows him into his apartment, which also doubles as an art studio, and which he says he doesn't allow others into that often. Alex is disturbed by his paintings, which are unsettling, but Harry simply says, "You paint what you know." He's also confident that Alex will never beat him, and when Alex loses again, Harry promptly makes him leave. The next time we see Harry, it's after two of his friends and chess buddies have been killed. Alex, who's beginning to have visions of the monsters and feels that they, as well as himself, may be connected to the murders, goes back to Harry's apartment. Though he initially doesn't let him in, he does relent, only for Alex to find him looking haggard, acting emotionally shattered and angry, and drunk, with his studio in shambles. Though Alex wants to talk about what's happened, especially when he sees a claw like that of the beings he's been seeing in one of the paintings, Harry insists that they play chess again. When they do, Alex ends up beating him, and quite quickly too. As it's the first time he's lost a game in over three years, Harry is hit hard by this. Forcing Alex to down some booze, he also tries to get him to play another round, and when Alex tries to get him to talk about his paintings, Harry grabs him and slams his head down on the table. This leads to Alex, as well as possibly Harry, experiencing a memory that prompts Alex to leave the apartment.

Alex later learns that the reason why all of this has started happening to him is because Harry is a "link," and that contact with him has enabled the monsters to appear to him. It's also revealed that Harry is his older brother, whom he was separated from following their mother's death. It turns out that, when the two of them were kids, Harry (Daniel Manche) and Alex's (Quinn Lujan) interactions allowed these entities to come through and seemingly possess their mother. After he was forced to kill her, their father (Larry Fessenden) not only put the boys up for adoption, but gave the 

lawyer strict instructions that they were not to be sent to live together, knowing it would allow these things to come through again. Some flashbacks show that the boys were dreaming about them, with Harry drawing pictures of them (as he would later do as an adult), and he warned Alex not to say anything or their father would separate them and send them away. He also promised to protect him as long as he was around. When Alex realizes who Harry is near the end of the movie, he rushes back to his apartment, but

Harry, by this point, is in the midst of a total mental breakdown, with all the memories flooding back to him at once, and the monsters closing in on him. Alex enters his apartment to find him dead, from an apparent suicide by shooting himself through the head. But, as earth-shattering as this revelation sounds, it's not played off well enough to be as impactful as it should be.

Alex's friend Jason (Paul Sparks) is kind of likable and funny, coming across as a sort of macabre stoner. His introduction is when he visits Alex at an apartment where he's house-sitting, telling him that the building's front door is wide open, adding, "I thought somebody broke in. I expected to find some lunatic raping your lifeless corpse." To that, Alex says, "Yes, yeah. That would be what you'd think." During this conversation, Jason also tries to encourage Alex, telling him, "Brain like yours should have a job with... NASA or... you know, one of those 

companies that hire really smart people." He's about to leave, when Alex collapses from a migraine, and makes sure that he's sent to the hospital. Jason has a wife named Stacy (Pollyanna McIntosh), and while she doesn't have much of a role, she's definitely memorable, if only for the scene where Alex spies on the two of them having sex, during which Stacy is wearing a pair of cowboy boots (the only thing she's wearing). After Alex has his third, stressful chess game with Harry, he rushes over to Jason and Stacy's apartment (when he meets Jason, the latter mentions that were a rumors about a peeper the other night, and he says that when he saw Alex at the building's front door, "I thought you might be the perv,"). He tries to make them understand what's going on, but, of course, they find it hard to believe. Then, he spills some secrets that he shouldn't know. Besides telling them that he knows they had sex an hour before he showed up, he also reveals that Jason coerced his dying father into changing his will and cheating his brother out of his inheritance, and that Stacy once flashed her work supervisor, as well as let him feel her up, in order to get a raise. Both of them vehemently deny these accusations, and Jason makes Alex leave. But, during the climax, when the monsters are truly after him, he runs back to their apartment in the middle of the night. However, he becomes a danger to them when he sees the monsters in their place and threatens them with a knife. The police arrive and, when he won't put the knife down, he's shot in the arm and taken away, still seeing Jason and Stacy as the monsters.

A very unlikely pair, to say the least, are Harry's friends, Sammy Chung (Patrick Wang) and Lloyd Carter (James Spruill), a young, gay Asian and an old black guy, respectively. Their exact relationship is never made clear, as Lloyd doesn't appear to be gay himself, but the two of them are inseparable, so they're probably just good friends. As stereotypical as they both are, especially Sammy, who's very flamboyant in his mannerisms, way of talking, and dialogue, they are fairly funny. In their first scene, when Harry beats Sammy at chess, he comments, 

"Fucked again, without even the courtesy of a reach-around." Reluctantly, he pays up, taking his money out of a Hello Kitty satchel, and after he convinces Alex to take his place in the game, he leaves, saying, "You two girls have fun now. I'm gonna go find me some respect somewhere else." When Alex first shows up to challenge Harry to a rematch, Sammy is eager to have his own rematch first in order to win his money back. But when Harry, packing up his pieces, asks, "And what makes you think today is going to be any different?", Sammy, completely insulted, responds, "Bitch." Neither he nor Lloyd are thrilled when Alex shows up at the park again some time later, looking for Harry, and they tell him that he'll have to go through them in order for a chance to play Harry again. That night, as they're walking near the docks, Sammy, who's been guzzling beer, has to stop off at a public restroom. When he goes in there, it turns out that spiky, red hairdo is a wig, which he briefly removes, and he's stalked and killed by one of the monsters. As for Lloyd, as he waits for Sammy outside, smoking a cigarette, he's startled by a loud commotion inside, and then goes in there to use the restroom as well. When he walks in, he sees Sammy's legs sticking out from under a urinal's door and comments, "Tanked after only a few drinks. Are you sure it isn't something you ate? Or maybe someone?" Hearing the monster growl, Lloyd responds, "Okay. So it ain't funny." It isn't until after he's taken a crap and hasn't heard Sammy respond to anything he's said that he realizes something's wrong. But he gets killed as well.

During this period, it was common for independent horror movies to get a number of beloved genre stars  in the cast and use them as a selling point for diehard fans, even though they were often little more than cameos (another example of this was the original Hatchet). In the case of Headspace, the most prominent one is Olivia Hussey as Dr. Karen Murphy, to whom Alex is referred after his stay in the hospital. As she's writing a book on cases like his, she asks that he allow her to document his progress across their sessions, agreeing to treat him free of charge. While he's hoping that she can help find a way to get rid of his painful migraines, Karen is much more interested in studying him. As their sessions go on, while she can't deny his incredible ability to absorb knowledge, she feels that some of what he's talking about can be rationally explained. She thinks his knowing the names and personal habits of the EMTs who took him to the hospital could've just been details of a dream he had after he passed out, or that the slashes across his stomach, which he says were done by the monster that attacked him in one of his apparent dreams, were self-inflected. Naturally, he doesn't care for her saying this, as he insists he's never lied to her. She also doesn't believe he had anything to do with the murders and tries to convince him of it by referring him to Boris Pavlovsky, a former meta-physician who once wrote about abnormal psychology. All this ultimately does is make Alex realize what's happening. By the end of the movie, when he's locked up in the hospital psych ward, Karen goes to him again and acts all motherly, promising no more pain. Then, she touches his crotch and he sees her possessed by the monsters, before she lunges at him, which is where the movie ends.

Dee Wallace appears at the beginning and end as Dr. Denise Bell, who recommends Alex to Karen. Though she sees him as completely healthy, save for the blackouts, she sends him to Karen because she figures her research might be able to help him. She's the complete opposite of William Atherton's Dr. Ira Gold, her unscrupulous colleague, as he sees Alex's growing intellect and brain function as a possible way to attain fame and fortune. He also proves to be an alcoholic who keeps bottles of booze hidden in his office, and ends up being the first victim in the main

story. Mark Margolis, who appeared in a number of movies, including many by Darren Aronofsky, and would later go on to have roles in both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, appears in one scene as Boris Pavlovsky, a scientist who was part of the Soviet Institute for Metaphysical Science in Moscow that studied people like Alex. He basically lays it all out to him about how these beings work and how they're finding him (and even then, it's still confusing). Udo Kier also appears briefly as Rev. Karl Hartman, a priest whom Alex talks with when 

he goes to a church as a last resort. Listening to him, he initially thinks that Alex is either an alcoholic or a drug addict, but then Alex insists he's being chased by demons from hell. Listening to him, Hartman tells Alex that the forces of good and evil are battling over him, adding, "You know, you have to be very careful. The devil can be a very tricky one." As expected, with those crazy eyes and that unsettling, soft, breathy voice of his, Kier makes Hartman come off as anything but reassuring, even when he hands Alex a 

Bible. He also gets to act all crazy when Alex sees him as evil and possessed, before the monsters kill him. And finally, Sean Young appears as Alex and Harry's mother at the beginning of the movie, wherein she becomes influenced by the monsters to attack her family, forcing her husband to kill her.

While certainly better than a number of others that I've seen, Headspace still has the feel of a low budget, early 2000's independent film. You see it right off the bat, as the opening credits look like something you'd expect to see in a student film or low-tier TV show, and the movie also just has a very generic, bland look to it, with a muted, unappealing color palette. There are a handful shots and scenes here and there that are kind of appealing, like the very abrupt opening scene, which has a notable, deep-blue look to it; the 

establishing shots of Alex and Harry's childhood home in the prologue; the nighttime scene inside the boys' bedroom; and a nice view of the city skyline at sunset. Also, Harry's paintings, which you first see during the opening credits sequence, as they're the focus of a montage of him painting them, do make for rather unsettling visuals, even before he begins incorporating the monsters into them. Speaking of which, there are some noteworthy instances of direction and cinematography as well, like in moments where you get quick glimpses of the

monsters, either in the foreground or the background. One moment that I do think was genuinely suspenseful is a high-angle shot of Lloyd as he's sitting on the toilet in the public restroom, unaware that Sammy's lying over there dead. As he does his business, you see a pool of Sammy's blood slowly spreading from the left side of the screen, towards Lloyd's feet. It comes very close to reaching him, when he gets up and walks out of the stall, not noticing it. But then, he approaches Sammy's body, only for it to get yanked away, before the monster next attacks Lloyd himself.

The editing is also a bit on the mixed side for me. When Alex has his visions, they often come in very quick flashes, which do work well, like in the scene where he's spilling Jason and Stacy's secrets. Sometimes, like when he gets an attack while spying on Jason and Stacy having sex, or at the very end, when the possessed Karen seems to get to him, they're just random, crazed images, like him shaking his head at a blindingly fast speed. However, they're often accompanied by these brief filter effects to get across

the pain they cause him, such as bright lights, distortions, or the screen briefly shaking, and they feel very cheap. The same goes for some warping and distortion effects from Alex's POV during the climax, when he's seeing the monsters appear out of nowhere. Also, when Boris Pavlovsky tells Alex of his first encounter with the monsters at the Soviet Institute of Metaphysical Science, the flashback itself is portrayed through a montage that goes back and forth from CCTV footage to a video camera documenting the experiment. It is an interesting way of doing it, 

and we only see eerie glimpses of the aftermath of the monsters' rampage, thanks to the static nature of the footage. But, since no on is actually watching this footage, I also wonder why that couldn't have been done as just a normal flashback, maybe showing a younger Boris experiencing what happened firsthand and running for it when things got too much for him. (They even briefly cut to a moment outside the POV of both recording devices, kind of interrupting the flow of the scene.)

Something else I can definitely compliment the movie on is the very nice location work, which was done completely in New York, including Manhattan itself, as well as other places like Katonah, Rockland, and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The prologue is set in a very lovely house out in the countryside, surrounded by woods, with a lovely lake off to its right and a swimming pool out in front. It suggests that Alex and Harry's parents were people of some means, although the interiors of this seemingly idyllic home become

sinister when their mother is seemingly possessed by the entities, kills their dog (I think she does, because the dog looks like he's still breathing when you see him), and comes after them. When we switch to the main story and New York City, we get some more picturesque locations, like the park where Harry is often playing chess on a granite chessboard, across from an old stone building (I've never been to New York, so let me know what that place is called), the lovely neighborhood where Alex goes to have his therapy sessions with Karen Murphy at her home, the 

area near the bay where Sammy and Lloyd are killed, and the city's downtown streets. Most of the interiors here don't look all that bad, either, like the nice apartment where Alex house-sits early on, Jason and Stacy's apartment, and Karen's house, which has that exact sort of feel you expect from the home of a therapist (if you've ever been to one, you know what I mean).

Surprisingly, despite the subject matter and the kind of characters we're dealing with, you don't get a lot of really seedy, rundown types of locations, interior or exterior. For instance, while it is small and tad cluttered, Alex's own apartment isn't as awful as you might expect, at least initially. It has an interesting touch in the form of a bed that looks like a red convertible, but there's also a medicine cabinet in the bathroom that's filled with numerous bottles of aspirin for his constant headaches, and the walls later become

covered with random pieces of paper he's written on (I really don't know what he's doing there). Harry's apartment, which also doubles as his art studio, is a large space, with unpainted walls, and is very sparse in terms of furniture and modern conveniences. It's mostly full of his paintings hanging on the walls, and there's also a large table in a side room where a chessboard is always waiting, and lots of large windows looking out at the city. While the buildings themselves are a bit rundown and unkempt, the first 

truly nasty place we see is the disgusting public restroom where Sammy and Lloyd are murdered. And like I've said, after they're dead, Harry has a mental breakdown and his apartment/studio falls into complete shambles, reflecting his mental state. The church where Alex meets Rev. Hartman is big and elegant, but also darkly-photographed and comes off a bit eerie, emphasized by Udo Kier's performance and his character's hideous fate. Boris Pavlovsky's home is similarly dark, lit by only a single lantern, and is very small, claustrophobic, and cluttered with 

materials likely pertaining to his research, also getting across that he's quite the recluse. And finally, when Alex is sent back to the hospital where he was examined at the beginning, he's last seen in the psych ward, strapped to a gurney in a padded cell that you'd expect to see in an insane asylum.

Before we get into the major reasons why I'm not a fan of Headspace, I do want to point out another minor gripe I have with it. Not to come off like a prudish snowflake, but this movie is unnecessarily crude and even nasty at points. It's not to the extent of a Rob Zombie movie, especially in terms of profanity and sexuality, but there are some moments where I think to myself, "Was that necessary?" While I do find Sammy to be fairly funny, there's a moment where he and Alex shake hands, and Sammy suddenly pulls his away and goes, "Ooh! What else have you

been doing with that hand?" That made me roll my eyes, as does much of the scene in the public restroom, before Sammy and Lloyd get attacked. As he's at the urinal, Sammy hears one of the monsters, which startles him and causes him to wet himself when he turns to look. You don't see this in graphic detail, but you do see an unflushed toilet when Sammy searches the stalls for Lloyd, thinking he's playing a joke on him. His reaction, "Oh, please!", is exactly how I feel about it. And speaking of Lloyd,

when he has to take a dump, you not only see him sitting on the toilet, him straining and grunting, but also hear both the farts and the sound of the shit splashing. I don't like it at the beginning of Friday the 13th Part 3, when you hear Harold crapping, so I especially don't like it in a movie I don't like, nor did I care to hear the sound of Sammy peeing. And while I have no problem with sex scenes, I didn't need to see flashes of Jason and Stacy doing it on their couch when Alex tells them he knows they had sex an hour before he showed up at their apartment. (Stacy is pretty damn hot, but I already saw enough of Jason's butt during the scene that Alex spied on earlier.)

I always give a low-budget horror movie like this credit when the filmmakers opt not to take the easy route and do a typical slasher movie or something of the sort. That's why I admire Don Coscarelli for what he came up with for Phantasm, despite having no money; similarly, Andrew van den Houten went with a much more heady (no pun intended) concept. He also took a lot of inspiration from the H.P. Lovecraft story, Pickman's Model, about an artist whose horrific painting subjects turn out to be very real, and applies a slow burn approach to boot. Unfortunately, the

movie not only doesn't do anything compelling with this concept (as a review from TV Guide noted, it, "Aspires to little more than the usual stalk and slash cliches,"), but trying to figure out what's happening and how it all works is so confusing that, like Alex, it gives you a migraine. You could say that makes it very evocative of Lovecraft but I think that's giving it too much credit. Moreover, the payoff is rather dumb and not worth the frustration.

Boris Pavlovsky tells Alex that these evil entities that are haunting him and killing those around him are from a completely different plane of existence. It's unclear whether they're literal demons from hell, creatures from another dimension, or what have you, and the same goes for their motives (again, there's the Lovecraft influence). They seek out people with enormous brainpower, called "links", and need at least two such people to come together to act as conduits for them to enter this world. Alex and Harry being together as children is what allowed them to

seemingly possess their mother and make her attack them. Their father picked up on this and thus, 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. But while their exact motives are unknown, Boris tells Alex that they haven't killed him yet because they're scared of the power of his mind. And that's about as much of an explanation as we get.

The way the monsters manifest is rather sporadic and inconsistent. Signs that someone is in danger of being attacked or, like Alex and Harry's mother, possessed, are flickering lights and when they begin bleeding from some part of their face, usually their nose. You also find out that anyone who touches Alex is in danger of being killed, as the monsters are able to literally smell his scent on everybody and everything he's come in contact with. But here's what's confusing: when Alex is around a potential victim, they sometimes act possessed, with the monsters 

speaking through them, and, like with Reverend Hartman, are then sometimes killed by them. This is depicted as something only Alex can see and the persons themselves aren't aware of. As Pavlovsky said, the monsters also attack people who've touched Alex, like Dr. Gold, or Sammy and Lloyd. And since Alex isn't there during these scenes, they don't act possessed. That I can wrap my head around. However, there's a hole here: at the beginning. the boys' father was trying to get them away from their mother because she was stalking them with a pair of 

butcher knives. And when he confronts her with the shotgun, he tells her, "You don't want to do this. Look, it's not you. Stop! Don't do this!" He can obviously see that she's possessed, so does that mean he's a link and passed it on to the boys? Also, the monsters apparently took her over completely, because she lunges at him with the knives, forcing him to shoot her. The only other time they do this is at the very end, when they apparently possess Karen Murphy when she visits Alex in his padded cell, yet 

they don't do this to Jason and Stacy during the climax in their apartment, even though Alex is seeing them as the monsters. You could argue that maybe it was because the cops show up and they wanted to frame Alex as insane so they could get to him while he's in a padded cell, but it's treated like something only he himself can see, suggesting that he's merely insane. Also, if the monsters need at least two links to manifest, as shown in a flashback to the experiments with links in the Soviet Union, how are they able to come through when Alex and Harry have so few scenes together? And how are some of the victims able to see them before they die when, according to Pavlovsky, only links can see them?

As I alluded to up above, there is that always possible explanation that all of this is a product of an unhinged mind, which is why so little of it gels together. In fact, the movie opens with a scene of Alex, covered in blood and wearing a hospital gown, walking through the park and sitting at the chess table where Harry always played, suggesting that everything we see from that point onward is being told from his disturbed point-of-view. I, however, assumed that maybe it was one of those late in the narrative moments we'll gradually see the lead-up to, and this is

strongly hinted at, as we see a quick flash from this opening following the ending with Alex and Karen in the psych ward, suggesting the monsters have now possessed him. Maybe, maybe not. But instead of intriguing, I find it aggravating, and by this point, I really don't care anymore.

Going back to the monsters, when you finally do see them at the end of the movie... the results are very mixed. I will give the filmmakers credit for using makeup and suits, rather than really awful CGI, but the designs aren't that impressive. They look like typical scaly demons, with horns on their heads, large, pointy ears, and sharp claws and teeth, as well as dog-like noses, which makes it hard to take them seriously. The texture of the skin on their chests is kind of gross and disturbing, and the growls and roars they make are threatening, but they're much more 

effective when they're creeping around in the darkness. Where they're most unsettling, though, is when they manifest through the people around Alex. Not only do these people bleed from various parts of their face, but they sometimes develop freakish cloudy eyes, sharp teeth, and bloody mouths. The monsters also sometimes speak through them, and they prove to be very sadistic. They taunt Alex, asking him if he wants to die like his mother and brother, and, during the climax, they dare him to kill 

Jason and Stacy while speaking through them. If they'd left it just at that and those brief glimpses of the monsters from earlier, as well as maybe only partly revealing them at the very end (like in Hammer's The Abominable Snowman), the movie might've gone up at least half a point for me.

The monsters may be a bit of a dud but, when it comes to the gruesome deaths, there's some really good stuff here in terms of makeup effects. When Alex and Harry's mother is killed at the beginning, the father blows an enormous, bloody hole through the left side of her head with his shotgun, and we see it from both the back and the front. It also looks as though the flesh around her mouth got blown off. We only see it in very quick flashes but, when Dr. Gold is killed, you see his face getting slashed up, and blood pools out from underneath his office door. Sammy

and Lloyd's deaths mostly happen offscreen, although there is that pool of blood that comes from where Sammy was killed, and you hear some squishing sound effects when Lloyd dies. Reverend Hartman gets a monster's hand through his chest, which then rips big chunks of his face off, as he screams in agony. And while Harry's death by suicide is another that happens offscreen, we do see the aftermath, and there's a gruesome suggestion that one of the monsters is eating his corpse afterward, as we hear some nasty crunching sounds.

The music score by Ryan Shore, who went on to score other independent horror films like Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, Andrew van den Houten's own Offspring, and The Shrine, is actually pretty decent. It has a memorable enough, melancholic main theme, which you first hear during the opening credits, and is repeated various times throughout the movie as a more low-key, piano version. Also, while not music you're likely to remember, the pieces for both the scary and dramatic scenes do their job well enough, though the use of Ave Maria during the scene where Alex rushes back to Harry's apartment during the climax came off as melodramatic. And in the scene where Alex first visits Harry at his apartment, you hear this really jazzy saxophone playing in the background. There are also some songs by some little known artists featured on the film's soundtrack, most notably Party Dress by After Midnight Project, which Alex is listening to while he's house-sitting, and What Is It by Phonodrive, when Alex watches Jason and Stacy having sex.

A year after I first reviewed Headspace, the Director's Cut was released, and while I wasn't too thrilled at the idea of another version that I would have to watch, I also hoped that, since it's seven minutes longer, it might clarify some things that the original version didn't. Well, that didn't pan out, for a couple of reasons. One, I couldn't find a stream of the director's cut that wasn't dubbed into some other language, and two, while skimming through it, the additions I noticed didn't add much. The most significant one is another scene between Alex and Harry, before 

Sammy and Lloyd are killed. Harry is noticeably more ragged than before, and also mentions taking medication to curb certain visions, only to then say he was just messing with Alex. They then have another chess match, and Harry notices Alex's developing skills, as the game goes on much longer than before, although Harry does ultimately win yet again. Other than that, we have Alex actually meeting Karen Murphy when he arrives for his first therapy session, and an extra shot of him locking the door to his apartment when he goes out for his second session. Big whoop, right?

I don't knock people who make independent movies, but just because they were able to make something through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, with little money and no studio backing, doesn't automatically mean I have to like it. And watching Headspace was excruciating for me, despite the initial cut being only 84 minutes. The late Stuart Gordon seemed to really like it and that's cool, but for me, it isn't worth the headache it causes trying to understand it. While it does have some instances of inspired direction and cinematography, lovely location work, good makeup

effects, and an okay music score, the basic concept, while trying to be more intelligent than your average indie horror flick, is confusing, muddled, and nearly impossible to figure out. Rather than being intriguing, it's just irritating, and makes you just give up. Also, the main character isn't that engaging, it's nice to see the people who show up for cameos but they don't add much in the long run, there are some unnecessarily crude and nasty moments, and the movie has an unavoidable cheapness to some of its editing and video effects. If you're like Gordon and can get something out of it, good for you, but I know for a fact that I will never watch this again.