Cookers (DVD)

I like the premise of Cookers: Two meth addicts and makers of the drug, Hector (Brad Hunt) and Dorena (Cyia Batten), hole up in a creepy, abandoned, reportedly haunted house. As they set up shop, horror blends with reality when the paranoid pair begin to hallucinate… or are they really seeing things?

The acting is excellent across the board: Hunt is hair-trigger twitchy, while Batten is pale and shifty. Merle (Patrick McGaw) makes three as the easygoing slacker/go-fer who tries to assist with their day-to-day needs. The dark, dusty dirty house, filled with the ghosts of the past, is practically a character in and of itself. The cinematography blends perfectly with its shadowy surroundings and makes the most of the actors’ ever-animate, freakish faces even when they’re not actually doing anything.

Unfortunately Cookers commits the cardinal sin that I hold most egregious: It’s boring. A movie can be hokey, a movie can be badly acted, or a movie can be uneven, but I just can’t abide a humdrum horror flick.

Never mind that Cookers isn’t a horror movie at all — false advertising is common in the movie and DVD tagline biz — but once you’ve seen how good the acting is and how nice the movie looks, that’s all there is.

Screenwriters Jack Moore and Jeff Ritchie should have cooked up a little more plot and added a dash of suspense to the mix. Director Dan Mintz didn’t have much to work with, but in the end he lets the audience go hungry.

The DVD does not have any additional release material, nor is it closed-captioned for the hearing impaired.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson