The Devil's Chair

Plot synopsis:
The film begins with Nick West lighting a cigarette in the dark and introducing himself to some unknown audience. He proceeds to recount the events he allegedly witnessed, claiming to be a "victim". It is implied that the whole story is told exclusively through his point of view.
Nick brings the easy and filthy Sammy to the abandoned Blackwater Asylum for using acid and having sex. They find a weird chair and Nick proposes kinky sex to Sammy; however the device traps and kills Sammy. Nick is arrested and considered insane, being sentenced to the Hildon Mental Institute in spite of claiming that supernatural forces killed Sammy. Four years later, the honorable Cambridge professor Dr. Willard proposes Nick's psychiatrist, Dr. Clairebourne (Nadja Brand), release him under his custody for an experimental treatment: exposing the truth to Nick by bringing him back to the crime scene. Dr. Clairebourne opposes, explaining that Nick still has severe delusions, but in the end she accepts. Nick is introduced to Dr. Willard, who expresses his desire to write a book about West and his experiences. With Dr. Willard assuming full responsibility for Nick, Dr. Willard, his assistant, Melissa, and the students Rachel Fowles and Brett Wilson, go with Nick to the Blackwater Asylum.
West begins to feel uneasy when the group enter the asylum, but a sympathetic Rachel tells him that he can leave tomorrow morning if he wants to, promising she won't tell the doctor. The group find the infamous chair. Dr. Willard reveals that the asylum warden was known to practice highly controversial methods of treatment. The night nears, and Dr. Willard tells everyone to go to sleep to have a fresh start tomorrow. In private, he confesses to Nick that the book he wants to write isn't actually about Nick, but about the chair. He admits to believing that Nick's "hallucinations" were actually real events. Willard shows him the warden's journal, from which he learned about the chair: it was used to test the warden's theory about the existence of the human soul. Nick becomes seemingly disturbed, as he says he actually came to believe he killed Sammy, but now isn't sure anymore.
As Nick is trying to sleep, he is approached by Rachel, who wants to prove to him that there is nothing supernatural about the chair. As she sits on it, she accidentally triggers the chair's controls and disappears. She is shown to have been transported into a dark building, where she is hunted by a demonic creature. Melissa persuades a skeptical Brett to sit in the chair, after which she triggers it, sending Brett into the same place as Rachel. Nick then willingly uses the chair to transport himself, believing he can save Rachel. The doctor and Melissa are shown to have plotted this all along. The events unfold quickly as Willard betrays Melissa, forcing her into the chair. He then transports himself. The group reunites as Rachel struggles against the creature. With the rest of the group incapacitated, the doctor subdues Nick and chants incantations, hoping to turn the beast to his side; however, Nick fights him off and, smiling, says that it is he who controls the Demon. In a plot twist, it is revealed that the chair itself and the demonic forces were just a product of Nick's imagination. It becomes evident that Nick assaulted the students and the doctor in the asylum, killing Brett. He then proceeds to rape Rachel and kill the doctor and Melissa. Lastly, he kills Rachel as she tries to escape.
After the massacre, a bloodied Nick gets into the car and chats with a woman who looks like Rachel sitting inside, asking her if she minds driving off with a "crazy person". She smiles and kisses him. However, the scene is then revealed to be another of Nick's hallucinations and he is then seen driving away from the asylum alone.

Tags: insanity, violence, cruelty, murder, sadist

Review:
The cinematography in this film is interesting and the sound effects give the movie a lot more edge considering the gore is minimal aside from the liberal use of blood.
Dying ?We've already seen it all before, and this time, although the production and cast are decent (the overall sound design is actually quite good despite too many squishy noises), I just can't help but think of Brad Anderson's excellent (if flawed in its own ways) "Session 9".
Way better.Sorry, but since braincells don't work on cash, a low budget doesn't excuse a poor script.So let's make it short : if you want gore & predictable "twists" you might enjoy this one ; if you'd prefer a better film go for "Session 9".
To top it off the main character - a mental patient - continuously delivers a voice-over with a lisp which I believe he suffers from, listening to which is as thrilling as a boat ride on dry land.Believe me you've seen it done before and better (Session 9 anyone?), don't punish yourself by watching the "Chair".
The main character of "The Devil's Chair" is a drug-dealer Nick West.He takes his girlfriend named Sammy to an abandoned asylum,when they discover the devil's chair which is the gate to the dimension of blood and despair.Sammy is brutally assaulted and killed by an unseen force,Nick becomes a suspect and is taken to the psychiatric ward.After four years he is released and joins Dr.Willard and his three companions to confront his demons where the supposed murders occurred."The Devil's Chair" is clearly influenced by Clive Barker's horror classic "Hellraiser".Like "Broken" the film is well-made and extremely unnerving.The way some sequences are shot will make your skin crawl.Some scenes are truly bloody and violent as all hell.The main demon of flies which smells blood looks impressive and very Lovecraftian.I can easily say that Adam Mason and Simon Boyes are the new masters of gruesome British horror.9 out of 10..
That is, until a prying doctor decides to take Nick back to the location, along with a team, to perhaps find some answers to what really happened that day.Some people might watch this, expecting just any horror, but it's not what you get.
I'd recommend this to horror fans, but be warned, this movie is like a magic trick, try not to get fed up with it and stop halfway through..
STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning Reckless Nick West (Andrew Howard) takes his girlfriend to an abandoned warehouse to drop acid, but when she sits on a weird chair, she is sucked into a demonic hole, leaving Nick traumatized.
But as members of the group go missing, it becomes clear something evil is lurking in the walls of this eerie place...When I first caught sight of this bizarre looking straight to DVD horror film, I soon cleared the sight of it from my mind, but finding it again in the bargain bin at Morrison's, I thought...why not give it a try?
While I don't feel I completely wasted my time, it does feel like a wasted opportunity in a lot of respects.Adam Mason's film is unsure whether it wants to play as a straight out mind fu*k, gore porn horror flick or a self referentializing parody of the genre, with the lead character giving voice overs saying how we'll like it 'if we saw Hellraiser or Pumpkinhead' and at one point lamenting what 'a poorly written, badly acted' film it's become, either the way the writing feels uncertain of itself and in turn loses the audience a bit.
That's not to say I thought it was a good movie, to be honest I thought it was a pretty bad movie but I still got a kick from watching it.I think as long as you don't expect a brilliant plot, you can enjoy this film.
There's a couple of overblown gore scenes but it kinda feels like a cheap 80's horror film which, if you're a fan of those, is nicely nostalgic.Because they haven't over thought the plot in an attempt to seem clever, you can tell what's going to happen from about five minutes in, but the acting in the film is surprisingly decent & the effects are pretty good to boot.
To say this film is conceited would be a massive compliment, it attempts the self aware horror take a la 'Man Bites Dog' where the protagonist psycho talks to the audience and even at one point says 'is this what you want, this badly written, terribly acted horror movie' or something of the sort and I agree whole heartedly.
Ex-mental patient Nick West (Andrew Howard) narrates the story (pausing every now and then to drop his two cents on the characters or to verbally berate the viewers of the film) of what happened when Dr. Willard, his colleague and 2 students bring him back to an abandoned asylum where Nick had seen his easy druggie girl die in a 'devil's' chair years before.
While this horror flick is interesting and has some good effects in regard to the chair itself it definitely lacks in some areas around acting and story.
I've seen a few of their horror movies and felt that they stand nowhere near Hollywood.For instance watch the scene in which the lead character's girlfriend is stuck in the chair.
They should watch films like "the others", "Exorcism of Emily rose" to learn the basics of horror movie making.I wasted my money on watching this crap on weekend.
Four years later, we see this stoner, now being released from a hospital for the criminally insane and forced to return to the scene of the incident by a Cambridge doctor who arranged his release, Dr Willaird, who looks like a cross between older Sean Connery and Mick Fleetwood, with a bit of Christopher Lee thrown in.Melissa (Louise Griffiths) and Rachel (Elize du Toit) are hot; and the rambling, stream-of-consciousness voice-overs of the lead actor are amusing to a point, but too much contempt for the audience quickly becomes tiresome.
If so, then it is the film-maker who has turned, in a final twist, insane and the movie become their demon that they do not love!
Right there, I had a problem believing such a dumb idea could actually happen.The "devil's chair" in the abandoned asylum is a sinister-looking chair with a skull, initially inoffensive, which "probes" people (creepiest effects of the movie) before shunting them off to another version of the asylum with a demon-skulled tentacled monster roaming.
The movie Devil's Chair is a decent low budget horror flick which, though suffering from several plot holes here and there and seemingly inescapable Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels type clichés, is nevertheless worth your while.
In short, if you can be forgivable to low budget horror flicks for working with what they have, and if you dig gore genre, this flick can honestly deliver several good chills down your spine, mainly by working with practical effects and cinematography, unlike the jump- scare-dependent films of recent years.
The film opens like an interesting throwback to old-school asylum horror and gradually shifts into a clever and ultra-macabre supernatural monster movie, reminiscent of the brilliant "Hellraiser" I & II, with extremely brutal violence and enormously grim set pieces.
Adam Mason's regular lead protagonist Andrew Howard (who looks a lot like a lesser muscular clone of Jason Statham) stars as junkie Nick West who, together with his blond bimbo girlfriend intrudes an abandoned mental institution for a wild night of sex and drugs.
The acting performances are more than decent, the pacing is fast, and there are a few nifty details that also contribute to the entertainment value of the film, like Nick West's brief but often very witty voice-over narration in between the regular dialogs.
Nick West has been accused of murdering his girlfriend in an abandoned mental institution.Nick West wants you to know the full story, and he is here to tell it for the better part of 90 loooong minutes.We see the full version of the initial events, the two twenty-somethings very much in lurrrrve wandering around the vacant and run down facility.
Nasty stuff.Stuff with lots of screaming.Stuff with lots of blood.Stuff with lots of gore.Stuff with lots of profanity (including more usage of the C word than I can recall in one film).Stuff with lots of Nick West.Stuff without much of my interest.I'll give The Devil's Chair some points for trying.
The Devil's Chair follows the story of Nick west who after taking his girlfriend out for a crazy LSD induced night with in the walls of a deserted asylum, finds himself accused of her brutal murder and is shipped off to a mental hospital.
Years later a doctor who is writing a book decides to take Nick back to the scene of the grisly murder along with some other students to find out the truth about what happened that night.It's very rare that after I watch a horror movie these days that I'm totally blown away and speechless.
This movie has it all a well written and acted script, beautiful special effects, and a ending that will leave you running the entire film over and over through your mind as if it's stuck on repeat for weeks to come.It's really sad that a movie like this did not see a nationwide theater release as it would have been a very fun and intense experience on the big screen.
Dr. Willard, his assistant Melissa (Louise Griffiths) and the students Rachel Fowles (Elize du Toit) and Brett Wilson (Matt Berry) head with Nick to the Blackwater Asylum finding the dreadful truth about the devil's chair."The Devil's Chair" is an original and extremely gore horror movie that explores a dark journey into madness and pain.
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'..
I'll tell you, it is one of those horror films that has one of those stupid plot twist in the end, the kind that doesn't put anything into perspective, the kind that leaves you with such a feeling of disappointment at the fact that they had a good concept in their hands and they ruined it completely, only with this film it felt like it was more deliberate, because you have this nice little "B" movie monster thing going for while and well into the film, guess what, it was never real it was all in his head and the rest of the movie doesn't make sense.Frankly I think considering the mood the ending left me in, this film is a disgrace to the horror genre, I saw a quote on this film stating "It turns the genre on its head" this film doesn't belong in the genre, the world would be spared if the makers of this thing would not consider to do a sequel..
I know horror movies are supposed to be far fetched and most of the time it is easy to forget how silly the plots can be but I couldn't do that with The Devil's Chair.
if someone would please explain why in god's name he axe-murdered everyone t the end of the movie (well, maybe not so much why, more of how in the world the filmmakers got there from the alternate dimension of blood-eating demons) I might think better of the movie, but for now, i give it three stars for leaving me utterly confused....
I originally remembered it from when it was passingly mentioned in another review of a horror film, and merely stumbled across the title when looking for a movie to pass the time with.
Now come on, we all know that the scariest films are the ones that don't reveal the 'monster' until the end of the movie, or at all.
I suppose there is an argument for the fact that the true 'monster' isn't revealed until the ridiculous ending, but I think the opening sequence of the movie prepared me too much for what was to come.In short this movie had some very poor performances, some totally predictable twists and some of the worst monster effects I have ever seen (one guy in the forum describes it as a skull in a bin bag, very accurate).
But for me the worst thing of all was the terribly annoying voice over, which I had hoped to God would only last the first few minutes, but continued right the way through the film, getting more and more irritating as it went.Whatever you do do not watch this movie, its not scary, its not original, and its 87 minutes of your life you'll never get back.
Oh, my brothers, let me tell you the story of a film that thinks it's far too clever for its own good.
There's no subsequent twist at the end to say, "But, wait, maybe it *was* supernatural!" Add a voice-over to make the audience sympathetic with the low-rent Jason Statham clone playing the lead (Andrew Howard) and give him complete control over the narrative (the film stops for his pithy comments with maddening irregularity) to make the big switch even more of a surprise.
It has the feeling of a student film where the crew have gone into a building, shot some random scenes, made a semi-contiguous story from the fragments of footage that they had filmed, and then at the last minute (during post production in this case - see the "Making of") decided to attempt to glue the whole thing together with overacted and poorly written narration from the lead character.
Showing real ambition, Mason links the Devils Chair to an excellent Lovecraft-style monster, made up of a mix of practice and CGI, which gets axed by burning red cuts into torture horror.Firing a Guy Ritchie-style gangster in the middle of a Horror movie, the screenplay by Boyes and Mason leans too heavily on the "Mockney" narration, which ends up as sounding more obnoxious than angry.
Together with students Melissa (Louise Griffiths), Brett (Matt Berry) and Rachel (Elize du Toit), they travel to the old mental asylum in hopes of finally finding out what really happened that night.What happens next is beyond any of their comprehension.The British have a way with horror movies.
Nick breaks the fourth wall and narrates what happens, stopping the movie periodically to make fun of either the other characters or us for watching the film.
TDC is a movie that shows refreshing honesty by admitting to its own incompetence half an hour before the end, but then berates the viewer for wanting to watch the film in the first place!
It had a proper back story to this chair, who built it, and why the Psychologist, mental patient (Nick West), and why psychology students were there at the asylum.Everything fell into place, except the end.
The first was, "Was there even a chair or another dimension, or was Nick just plain bonkers?" The second was, "Did Nick plan this out when they left the asylum he was admitted to, since he was just a plain murdering psycho anyway?" Or three, "Did the chair turn him into a psychopath after he crossed?" I guess you can interpret the ending in your own way.You wont be disappointed in any of the acting in this movie.
The movie not only is an UTTER waste of time, but it also pisses on horror fans, and uses the oldest, most unimaginative plot-twist in the book..