After an unnerving brush with death, a filmmaker finds that his ordeal isn't quite over in this modestly budgeted horror movie. Tom Kempton (Alex McArthur) is a successful animator who wants to get away from the hustle and bustle of Hollywood for a while. He joins several friends for a vacation in Northern Michigan, where they rent snowmobiles to make the most of the snowy winter weather. Kempton gets separated from his friends while exploring the slopes and soon finds himself lost; looking for
shelter, he takes refuge in a small cabin, only to discover it's inhabited by Vanessa Boulette (Laura Esterman) and her sister Ann (Sage Allen), a pair of elderly siblings with a feeble hold on reality and a taste for human flesh. Captured and tortured by the Boulette sisters, Kempton is saved at the last minute, but the experience makes a deep impression on him and he uses his fearsome experience as the basis for his next project. Even though Kempton has been reassured that the Boulette sisters died in their showdown with the authorities, he's convinced the threat isn't gone, and it turns out he's right -- one of the sisters had a bastard daughter which was put up for adoption, and her son now displays many of the same psychotic tendencies as his grandmother. Suspended Animation marked a return to the horror genre for director John D. Hancock, who in 1971 made the cult favorite Let's Scare Jessica to Death. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
Describing what's bad about this movie is like describing what's orange about an orange, but suffice it to say that the best performance is given by a crucified raccoon.
Alternately tense and cheesy, Suspended Animation returns its director, John Hancock, to the blood-soaked turf he spaded 30 years ago with his ageless nail-biter Let's Scare Jessica to Death.
The film is like vomiting and then expecting your shoes to come out of your mouth. Neither is a pleasant experience, but on some level it has to be seen to be believed.
DVD First Viewing, 1 Hancock film seen Suspended Animation is an interesting horror film. It shifts in tone and story so much that even the rental box synopsis only covers the first 30 minutes of it or so. Perhaps it was the right length for the story it was trying to tell, but I felt that it was much too long.
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