Resurrection Mary

Many people will think this movie is low quality all around. It is low budget but I think it's high quality all things considered. Kevin Schmidt is an up and coming creative actor who needs to star in more projects.

Resurrection Mary (Sean Michael Beyer, 2007)

Resurrection Mary, one of what seems to be a wave of urban-legend-themed films sprouting up in the horror underground these days (viz. Fingerprints, The Gravedancers, etc.), is actually one of the movies in the genre--and there aren't many--that could've shone under the right circumstances. It's got slick production values for a low-budget shocker, a director with a decent amount of experience, and a drop-dead-gorgeous lead. The connections even managed to get Robert Stack to lend them some Unsolved Mysteries footage about the urban legend upon which the film is based. Unfortunately, it's got nothing else.

Mary (Pamela Noble, from the upcoming The Diet Life) is a lovely young lass in roaring-twenties Chicago. After a fight with her boyfriend at a club, she ends up walking home alone. Until, that is, she is run down by a drunk driver. Fast forward eighty years, and the old "ghostly hitchhiker" urban legend has sprung up around Mary (as a side note, this is actually the case; Resurrection Mary is called by a number of paranormal sites "Chicago's most famous ghost", and even has her own Wikipedia entry). It strikes closer to home for Jeff Pryce (Cheaper by the Dozen's Kevin Schmidt) than most folks, as he picks Mary up one night after almost running her down himself and feels an instant attraction between the two of them. Oddly enough, the feeling seems mutual, and by the time Jeff realizes what's going on, he's in way over his head. Can he be the one to finally break Mary's curse?

The place to start here is with the acting, which is painfully, gloriously, phenomenally awful. Noble, the least experienced person on the screen during this movie, has the kind of flat affect that, in real life, makes me suspect a recent head injury, but her performance doesn't really stand out in this morass of acting stagnation. While Beyer managed to pick up an otherwise solid, if not all-star, cast for this, I've seen movies where no one had ever been in front of a camera before where the acting is uniformly better than this. It probably doesn't help that the script, co-written by Beyer and Ryan Lamaster, is ham-handed and mawkish, trying (and failing) to blend romance and horror. And my oh my, the special effects. The movie doesn't do too much in the way of effects, and after seeing the climax, you'll understand why. Not the movie's strong point at all.

But, you know, it looks really good. Cemetery junkies will love some of the shots in here. Everyone else, well, it's like watching a train wreck; you just can't tear your eyes away, wondering how much worse it's going to get. Trust me, you'll be rewarded when you hit that climax. * 

I happened to be invited to the filming of this movie for one night and came away impressed with many of the young actors but even more so with the Director, Sean Michael Beyer. I think he squeezed everything he could out of his small budget-mainly due to the quality of his principal crew and his acting cast of mostly young people. Budget was likely a little bigger than his debut film, Down the PCH, but as with that film, you see so much more potential that what the production values tied to the budget would indicate. It is time for someone to step up and invest in this director with a few million dollar budget film. He would definitely come through for them, I believe, and we could see even more of his talent.

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