Sublime Movie Review

If you have a fear of doctors, do yourself a favor and don't watch Sublime. To put it bluntly: The film is about a guy named George (Ed star Thomas Cavanagh) who is given a colonoscopy on his 40th birthday (way to party, George!), and encounters a series of complications, each more gruesome than the next. Or so we are led to believe... When George's condition and the hospital turn surreal (most notably, when a black man in a bow tie named "Mandingo" (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) starts dismembering the guy in the bunk next door), we start to question whether George is hallucinating, dead, in a coma, or whether all this stuff is really happening after all.

This is psychological horror, so prepare yourself for some twists. But its first half, in which ominous things occur while George is spending his final night before the procedure and steeling his nerves for it, really ratchets up the tension, scene by scene. Maybe it was just a vaguely anxious mood I was in during my screening of the DVD, but for some reason the hair on the back of my neck was on end for the first full hour of the movie... strangely panicked about what was going to happen next.

The second half unfortunately veers toward gore and the kind of nonsense we've come to expect from oh-no-they-didn't-go-there horror these days. And they go there. Hell, when you've got a guy named Mandingo running around with a pair of garden shears, you're in a rare kind of movie.

Whether you'll stick with the movie through to its disappointing end will depend entirely on your stomach for blood, dismemberment, and, ultimately, copouts of epic proportion.

DVD includes a commentary track, interviews, and the webcast of the "surgical exorcism" seen briefly during the film.

Ed's dead, baby. Ed's dead.