Horror Movie Review: Petrified (2006)

You should know by now what you’re getting in for if you choose to watch a Full Moon Productions movie. Chances are it might be entertaining but it’s just as likely to be thrash. If we’re lucky it’s a combination of both which is not the case with Petrified.

Directed by Charles Band, Petrified might be one of the worst horrors to come from the director and Full Moon Productions to date. Which is saying a lot considering the rubbish they’ve put out.

Opening with a group of thieves bringing some black-market antiquities to their buyer. Inside is the mummified remains of an alien recovered from an ancient UFO crash site. The thieves end up betraying the man who hired them and kill him. However, one of them is actually an undercover federal agent who manages to escape with one of the boxes that contains the alien hand.

The rest of the mummified alien then comes back to life and kills the thieves by turning them to stone with its glowing eyes. It wants its hand back or maybe it’s just out to kill…the film doesn’t really offer an explanation. Not that it matters.

The agent who escaped finds a building in the woods to hide out in. This place turns out to be a clinic for nymphomaniacs, female nymphomaniacs. Now, naturally you’d think this would mean we’d get copious amounts of nudity but Band is actually quite reserved in this regard. There are some fleeting moments but nowhere as much as you’d expect in a nymphomaniac clinic!

It turns out though that the clinic is actually a front for a scientist. Who is conducting experiments on the females in the hope to create eternal youth.

Remember the alien mummy? Good, because Petrified forgets about it in favour of lengthy conversations between the male and female leads. Sometimes for exposition, mostly to lay the groundwork for a romantic subplot that never engages. Thanks to the lack of chemistry between them.

Eventually the alien mummy arrives and sets about aiming its glowing eyes at the clinic inhabitants.

The added ‘mad scientist’ plot-point could have been interesting but it’s only used to fill time and amounts to absolutely nothing. Very frustrating considering the amount of time we spend with it.

Petrified does this a lot. Introducing characters, having us spend an age with them for it all to amount to nothing. It’s like they had the basic outline of a horror and didn’t know how to fill it so just stuck in anything they could think of.

It’s infuriating. An infuriating movie that should have been a schlocky and fun b-movie but instead is just a bore.