If you go to the IMDb page for Studio 666 and click on screenwriter Adam Hackbarth's name, you'll find a bit of trivia: he banged out the screenplay for The Possessed (a.k.a. Studio 666) in thirty "work hours." And I hope I'm not just going for the obvious jab when I say that it shows.

Sure, it's easy to kick a movie like this: it was shot on video for very little money with no professional actors ... and very little in the way of production value. It's such a low-rent, derivative little pseudo-slasher that even if you enjoyed it (which you wouldn't) -- you certainly wouldn't remember it two days later. But I see all these dinky little DTV horror flicks as the calling cards of the next aspiring wave of Raimis, Jacksons, and Carpenters. So even while I know that most of these movies will suck cheese, I really do try to find something of value.

Sadly, Studio 666 has nothing like that to report. It's about a young lady rocker who blows her brains out, waits three months, possesses an old girlfriend of hers, and then slowly stalks and stabs the members of her old clique. The setting, of course, is a dilapidated old music studio. Or ... a vacant office with a few mixing boards and guitars thrown around.

The movie's not particularly scary or funny or gory enough to keep the horror hardcores from flipping the thing off after twenty minutes (if they're not already fast asleep). The long and languid volleys of dialogue that occur between the slayings are a heavy price to pay for such a paltry parcel of carnage, and on the whole, Studio 666 looks like something that was slapped together over the course of three days.

The DVD

Video: It's a fullscreen (and generally pretty awful) transfer.

Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0, which is whisper thin during the dialogue and annoyingly loud when the grungy music kicks in.

Extras: Five trailers from the Razor Digital collection: Xtracurricular, Men in Scoring Position, Man Outside, Kingdom of the Blind & Spring Fever USA.

Final Thoughts

I'm sure that Studio 666 was a labor of love for those who worked on the flick, and I hope they all move on to bigger and better schlockworks in the future, but frankly I'm just sick to death of the whole "shot-on-video in my backyard" stuff. Just because you own a video camera and grew up in love with Michael Meyers and Leatherface, that doesn't mean you should make movies.