The creators of this film would like to thank movie piracy. I'm not kidding, this movie was downloaded from fileshare nearly 400,000 times a week, before it was legally realesed on DVD. This story came about when no big studio wanted to pick it up for theatrical realese. The film was realesed on the directors website, and then it became one of the most illegally downloaded films of all time, thus, Ink was realesed on DVD, in a somewhat mass-market fashion. I stumbled upon this film while walking across my local rental house, and not seeing anything else that look as interesting (or that was in), and what I got was a mixed bag, but I was surprised.
Ink tells the story of what happens to us while we sleep, in our dreams to be more presice. As it turns out, people who have already died, come to us in our sleep and gives us our dreams. But of course, if some people can give dreams, others can give nightmares. Things called The Incubus are responsible for keeping us up at night, and making our sleeping subconcious hectic. When we die, we have a choice, to become a giver of good dreams, or a giver of bad. Our main villian, Ink, has chosen to be evil, and to join the Incubus, he must kidnap a little girl, and bring her back to the Incubus world. While being transported to this dream world the little girl is in a "coma", and her father won't come and see her for various reasons you'll have to find out. All this going on while the good dreams try and get her back from Ink.
While the plot may seem a little farfetched (which it admittly is) it is a movie, and a chance to escape, and create a world of which we wouldn't normally see. The story was nice, well paced, interesting, and, overall hopeful. The movie has a nice twist, and it could have easily made the movie very confusing, but the directors keep it simple, with no over, or underexplanation of the story, and everything fits well together.
The film has a very cool visual style that goes along with it. The Incubus look really cool, as does a lot of the other fantasitcal creatures. But a few of the costumes definatly looked like they were from a low budget movie. More cool style comes from the editing, which is quick, and choppy some moments, and slow and flowing in others. Post-production colors changes, switching to negative, painted backgrounds and other techiniques made the film very cool. The special effects were decent for this kind of movie, the subtle ones were the best, while the big obvious ones looked kind of hokey.
"You've done well Ink"
Most of the acting in this movie was done by newcomers. Most of them did an impressive job, if fact Chris Kelly had a duel role, and does very well. However, some of the other acting was up to par with his, it seemed really uneven, and some roles were bigger than others, and some of the small ones were done better than the bigger ones, and it seemed like it had an odd casting job.
The last note that I would like to pointout is the sets and costumes. Some of the sets were very good looking, and others looked like they were shot in an alley. The costumes were nice as well, granted some of them were kid of boring. Also, one of the charecters has a very big nose, which seemed to vary in size quite a bit. I don't know, just noticed it.
Overall, Ink was a very fun surprise, a cool independent film experience, and shows want-to-be film makers how a low-budget film is done. The style is cool, the writing is solid, and a good 30% of the acting is solid. However, that leaves another 70% of acting that I didn't like, and somes of the sets and costumes looked fake. I still enjoyed the film, as a whole experience though.
Ink
"You've done well Ink"
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