Product Description

Ten years after officer Dwayne Hooper’s son disappeared, the final of 14 victims in a string of local unsolved disappearances, his suspicions are aroused by prison inmate Perkins. Dwayne searches Perkins’ house and discovers a collection of torture videos featuring the missing victims from the past. In a fit of rage, Dwayne kills Perkins. But things get complicated when a wave of carnage which sweeps the town, with reports of Dwayne’s own son amongst the marauding psychopaths.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43834 in DVD
• Brand: AFTER DARK HORRORFES
• Released on: 2009-03-31
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 95 minutes

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
Ah yes, another year and another lineup of After Dark Horrorfest flicks. Perkins' 14 is the most interesting of the bunch, considering its history involves a fan-submitted idea and story. While that alone is reason enough to give this film a look, Perkins' 14 as a whole sadly doesn't amount to much. The story involves small town cop Dwayne (Patrick O'Kane) whose young son was kidnapped a decade earlier. He soon figures out that the abductor is Ronald Perkins (Richard Brake) and that he's inhabiting one of the cells at the station, and learns that his son is still alive, and among the 14 children that Perkins had imprisoned and experimented upon to turn them into killing machines. And before you know it, they're all set free and begin wreaking havoc on the town. That's all there really is plot wise, as Perkins' 14 features some gigantic leaps in logic and a variety of dumb people doing dumb things and winding up dead for it. There might be some level of enjoyment to find in the film, but it is so bleak, gloomy, and awfully lit that it will be hard to do so. Directed by Craig Singer, who helmed Dark Ride for the first round of After Dark Horrorfest flicks, Perkins' 14 is a disappointing waste. There was Feast-style potential here to be sure in terms of the story, setting, and characters, but in the end, Perkins' 14 falls mostly flat. There's decent gore effects and a small role from former Misfits singer Michale Graves, but it isn't enough to warrant Perkins' 14 as anything other than wasted potential.

I should have known this was an After Dark movie...
Perkins' 14 (Craig Singer, 2009)

Perkins' 14 was not in any way the movie I was expecting it to be given the DVR's description. I originally thought that was going to be a good thing (it sounded like a continuation of the final scene of a really bad seventies TV movie called The Clone Master. Ever see it? Don't bother). Then it turned out to be a very, very bad thing, but not a bad thing so bad that I actually turned the movie off. It's watchable, in a "how awful can this thing get?" kind of way, and sometimes that's just what the doctor ordered. Not this time, but still.

The Perkins of the title (Cold Mountain's Richard Brake) kidnapped a series of fourteen children from a small town over the course of a decade or so, including the son of Dwayne Hopper (Exorcist: The Beginning's Patrick O'Kane), a sheriff's deputy. After a chance encounter brings the two of them together, Hopper gets the idea that Perkins may be responsible for the disappearances, and sends another officer out to Perkins' house while Hopper interrogates him. This turns out to be an exceptionally bad idea, for Perkins has the house booby-trapped, and he's trained his ill-gotten kids to be very, very bad indeed. And once they get out of the house...

I saw seven or eight different paths as I was watching this that the script could have taken that would have made this a pretty good movie. It took none of them, instead going right between serial killer avenue and zombie invasion boulevard, snatching all the usual clichés and putting them in all the proper places, right down to the predictable ending that was supposed to be unpredictable (it's so cliché I can't even bring myself to call it a twist). For as high-caliber a cast as Singer (Dark Ride) was able to assemble for this flick, as well, the acting really seemed kind of low on the scale. Brake does some good work, but Irish-born O'Kane's redneck accent sounds more like Henry Rollins trying to talk like a robot, and most of the rest of the cast go downhill from there. The direction is competent, if nothing inspired, but that alone is almost never enough to carry a movie where everything else is so mediocre-to-awful. Such is the case here; avoid this one like the plague. *

Gruesome Fun
Perkins 14 is another entry in this year's batch of After Dark Horrorfest films and one of the better ones. Patrick O'Kane plays Dwayne Hopper, a member of a small tourist town's Sheriff Department. Ten year's earlier, Hopper's son Kyle was kidnapped from his bedroom, the last of 14 child abductions that went unsolved. The pain of losing his son has driven Dwayne to alcoholism and torn his marriage apart. As Dwayne checks in for the night shift, he finds that a mysterious man named Perkins is locked up in the jail. As Dwayne talks to him, he becomes convinced that this man may no something about the child abductions.

Against orders from his superiors, Dwayne investigates the man's home to find numerous dank, dirty, but empty cells in Perkins' basement. He also finds a library of video tapes, all showing the torturous treatment the children received at the hands of Mr. Perkins. Now you're thinking that this may be one of those cat and mouse type thrillers where the cop knows who the killer is but does not have any legal evidence to charge him with. Will the cop go against his superiors to get revenge on the man who took his son? Ah, but here's where Perkins 14 tosses us a curve ball. It's a tale of revenge to be sure, but not the cop's revenge. As mentioned, Dwayne found only empty cells. Those children, now teenagers, tortured and turned into feral, drugged up beasts, have been set loose on the small town in a rampaging, "28 Days Later" style, attacking everything in their path and devouring their prey.

Director Craig Singer's quick change of direction from taut thriller to zombie-style action was surprising and well disguised. There's gore-a-plenty as bodies are literally ripped to pieces leaving the bestial kids to wrestle over pieces of entrails. It culminates with a standoff in the town's police station as a small group of survivors tries to survive the night.

Perkins 14 is not without its drawbacks. It's hard to imagine that a small town could be overrun by a group of 14 people, even if they are animalistic. Rather than try to remain hidden in their homes the residents of Stone Cove seem all too willing to venture out at night and make themselves easy targets. And it seems as if the Sheriff's office only has about three guns...go figure. The women in the film, and I mean all of them, are guilty of overacting, particularly Mihaela Mihut, who plays Dwayne's wife, Janine. They end up distracting the viewer from the plot and you're soon hoping they become the next meal.

Singer also directed the 2006 After Dark Horrorfest entry, Dark Ride, and while it's not a classic, Perkins 14 is certainly better than that earlier effort.