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The Id
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Hutson Ranch Media Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (20th November 2016). |
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The Film
 For the past twenty-odd years, Meredith Lane (A Nightmare on Elm Street's Amanda Wyss) has been the sole caregiver for her invalid father (Patrick Peduto) who holds his resentments for her mother who walked out on him against her. Meredith is almost numb to his verbal abuse and accusations of her promiscuity stemming all the way back to the time he caught her in the living room with prom date Ted (Ryan Bouton), but he can always find some way to twist the knife ("Who do you have to look good for," he asks when he notices that she has put on some lipstick). Something keeps her in this cycle of abuse to the extent that she brushes off advice and flatly refuses offers of help from social worker Tricia (Jamye Grant) who delivers meals daily. When she gets a phone call from Ted who is in town and wants to meet up on the weekend, Meredith hesitates, self-conscious about the passage of time and the fantasies she has built up around him. Unable to escape her father's torment even in her dreams, memories, and erotic fantasies, Meredith accepts Ted's invitation and confronts her father with her determination to have a life outside the house. When her father forbids her to see Ted, Meredith stands up to him, attempting to counter his threats of reporting her for physical abuse (when she lashes out after being spit on) by asking who else would take his own brand of emotional manipulation. As the weekend nears, Meredith's thoughts turn towards murder, but her father remains such a formidable figure that she is unsure whether she actually has killed him or not. "The most important man in a woman's life is her father," according to The Id, a horror-tinged character study that in loneliness, broken dreams, and co-dependence that falls back a little too quickly on jump scares and nightmare imagery – the film was the directorial debut of Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy documeantary writer/producer Thommy Hutson and fellow producer Daniel Farrands (who has scripted entries for the Amityville and Halloween franchises but not Elm Street thus far) – when the film had already demonstrated during the first half how much emotional mileage it could get out of Wyss alone (the montage of her trying to relive her high school days as she prepared to meet Ted again is pitiful enough without the threat of her father's specter popping up where she least expects it). It goes without saying that the Ted she eventually meets is not the one she expects; but although Bouton played the teenage version of Ted to i>Erin Austin's teenage Meredith, Meredith's fantasy Ted is played by hunky Brent Witt who also plays a responding police officer during the climax (which is made more agonizing by Meredith's behavior than the suspense of any of the characters stumbling upon a body). Well-acted and at times quite intense, The Id might have been better off played straight rather without the fanboyish nods the films which this writer admittedly finds endlessly enjoyable. Another nod to the Elm Street series comes in the form of two eighties-style songs performed by Tuesday Knight (Mistress), the star of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (for which she also recorded a song for the music video-styled title sequence).
Video
Shot with the Red Epic camera, the film's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen encode looks well-detailed in close-ups but an overall deliberate stylistic softness cannot be blamed for some aliasing on long shots of the house exterior which are either a fault of the lower bitrate encoding or the original videography.
Audio
In a rather bizarre move, the film's 5.1 mix has been given a lossy Dolby Digital encoding while a 2.0 stereo downmix has been provided in uncompressed LPCM. The 5.1 track is preferred in terms of surround trickery and jump scares, but the 2.0 track gets the job done as well. There are no subtitles or captioning options.
Extras
First up in the extras is an audio commentary by director/producer Timothy Hutson and actress Amanda Wyss in which they cheerfully describe the shoot, discuss the dark places the script carried Wyss and Peduto and how they worked out some of the more wrenching and violent scenes, and also reveals that a shot between Wyss' legs in the bathtub was a homage to a shot in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Besides the film's trailer (1:58) and a photo gallery (2:00), the disc also includes audition clips (8:45) for actors Peduto, Grant, Malcolm Matthews who plays the disappointing real life version of Ted, Brent Witt who doubles as Meredith's idealized version of grown up Ted and one of the police officers during the climax, and Stefanie Guarino who plays the other officer. The behind the scenes (8:55) featurette is just raw video of some of the shoot while "Needs, Wants & Desires" (25:25) is an actual structured featurette with commentary from the cast as well as writer Sean H. Stewart and Hutson and Farrands who reveal that the impetus for the film was their desire to make a feature after collaborating on the horror film series documentaries Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History Of Friday The 13th, and Scream: The Inside Story. A series of deleted and alternate scenes (6:29) are all rather short but accompanied by text that describes why they were omitted or replaced with other takes. The disc also includes start-up trailers for the aforementioned Elm Street and Friday the 13th documentaries as well as the Return of the Living Dead documentary More Brains!.
Overall
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