The Tattooist is a slow moving, haunting film. The movie really is slow moving, and I usually don’t mind that if there is a lot of tension or story that it helps progress. This movie is just slow for the sake of being slow, and the actors aren’t exactly high caliber, forcing the viewer to sit through some odd set up, and weird character development that truly isn’t all there.
The movie surrounds a tattoo artist that claims he has healing powers with tattoo’s that he makes. The movie shows him putting a tattoo on a young child, his father promising him money for it, although hesitant, our main character gives a very young boy a tribal tattoo. Flash forward to a tattoo convention and our main character stumbles into a Samoan tattoo ritual after seeing a lovely lady smiling at him. He then leaves, but before he completely vanishes, he steals an ancient instrument of tattoo delivery. As he steps outside he runs into the boys father (refer to the beginning of this paragraph), who claims that his tattoo did nothing to help, and the story progresses from this point. But first the camera quickly pans to a minor injury, where our hero of sorts lands hand first onto the ancient tattoo needle….foreshadowing the rest of the film, and we’ll get to that.
For some odd reason the tattooist, who’s name is Jake, travels to New Zealand to hunt down this woman. He is not in a foreign place, which I initially thought, he finds his old pals and begins to set up shop there tattooing people. However, each person begins to die horrible tattoo related deaths, and he starts to worry. Eventually he tracks down the woman, and is connected into a web of strange cult-like hauntings only to realize that the art of “tatu” isn’t just fun and games.
Here is a trailer for the film The Tattooist:
I hope that synopsis made sense, because I found it hard to even come up with that much information about this movie. The set up seemed painstaking at times, and following along was really not fun. However, right when I was ready to throw in the towel on this vapid film, a sex scene occurred and I was back at it, paying lots of attention. I don’t think I would have cared as much about this random sex scene, but the woman involved looked like my eight grade crush, and I couldn’t help be remember all those times that I was nervous around her. As an adult, obviously these memories are just that, memories, but it’s rad to think how movies can help you bring back old memories. After this sex scene things start going really bad, as people are dying some awesome deaths. The deaths usually involve lots of ink being dripped slowly from the wounds of the tattoo’s done by Jake and they flow like fountains.
The third act in this film is where things start to fall apart for me. Thrown in for good measure there is a family feud, a well kept secret about the woman’s uncle killing a boy, and of course if that wasn’t enough a ghost. Yep, they threw in a ghost to make sure we were still scared, and you know what? No one is scared, and no one cares at this point, making me wonder why anyone would spend any amount of time trying to watch this piece of crap film.
Granted, this film is straight to dvd, and the woman (who is a relatively unknown actress) looks like my 8th grade crush, this movie isn’t going to spark a lot of fires within the horror community. The Tattooist has a great amount of graphic design revolving the packaging, and pointing towards a better market for straight to dvd horror films, but this movie just isn’t very well paced, well acted, or scary at all. I wouldn’t highly recommend this film at all, and more over, I would most likely only see this film if you’re a male and like nudity, although brief. This straight to dvd, or seemingly straight to dvd effort really is lacking in the scares, the gore, and the horror elements. Sure we get a haunting, sure the tattoo death effects are awesome, but the story is so choppy and the set up takes so long that if you’re still around for the closing moments of the film, you’re going to be upset.
The Tattooist is now available on dvd, and while it has some great effort, it doesn’t do the job of scaring up anything. Unless you count my 8th grade crush, spank bank material. Uh…I didn’t really just say that…you’re imagining things.
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