I love horror movies that are original and aren’t afraid to break the mold by trying something different. With The Red Man, the elements of horror and thrillers are mixed with art-house themes and experimental styles, culminating in a special film that was a trippy experience, but one that was partially difficult to understand. Jimmie Gonzalez penned the story that follows successful DJ Evan (played by Daniel David Diamond) who lives inside a glamorous apartment building reserved for the upper-class. Soon he discovers that his friend and landlord (played by Daniel Faraldo) is part of a dark secret society who are drugging and murdering the building’s celebrity tenants. Michael O’Neal, Lindsey Naves, Jayne Krashin, Luke Jones, Charissa Saverio and Eloy Mendez also star in this film directed by Jimmie Gonzalez. John Acquaviva executively produced.
The Red Man succeeds by combining music, horror and thematic artistic representation into a cohesive movie we haven’t seen before. It’s certainly going to be a hidden gem for horror fans with more subtle tastes and desires to explore other sides of the genre outside of slashers and monster movies; and I think that may be the reason why the typical horror fan shuns it. The Red Man isn’t going to be suitable for everybody, so you need to know what you’re in for before you seek it out and rent it on VOD. It’s gruesome, it’s suspenseful, it’s well acted and a glitzy produced movie, but it’s served to you inside a steaming pot of originality by means of story-telling and production style. It’s not cut and dry and that’s going to require you to think and problem solve and analyze.
And that’s why it may have missed the mark with me. Maybe it was a little too high class for my tastes. The lines between reality, hallucinations and drug induced comas become too blurred near the end and I don’t know which scenes were part of the action and which scenes were part of the story. This made the story-line unclear at the end of the feature. Was the family really massacred? Was he as successful a DJ and was he a writer? With all this in question, I can only critique the movie based on what I understood and how it was produced. Minus the confusion, The Red Man is a glossy, stylish showing of darkness depicted in an invigorating way. It harkens back to the old days of horror when masked cults were at the forefront and it unnerves you without going out of its way to do so. It’s a blood soaked and psychologically damaging acid trip.
The music won’t be the only thing that gets your blood pumping! This baby’s got erotica, too! Final Score: 7.5 out of 10.
