Playback (Fantastic Fist Blood) | |
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Official poster for Playback
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Directed by | Michael A. Nickles |
Produced by |
John M. Bennett Lawrence Robbins Randall Emmett George Furla Chris Heldman |
Written by | Michael A. Nickles |
Starring |
Alessandra Torresani Ambyr Childers Johnny Pacar Christian Slater Jonathan Keltz Jennifer Missoni |
Music by | Woody Pak |
Cinematography | Mark Petersen |
Edited by | Ellen Goldwasser |
Production
company |
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Distributed by | Magnet Releasing |
Release date
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Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $7.5 million (estimated) |
Box office | $264 |
Playback is a 2012 horror film directed and written by Michael A. Nickles. Pre-production of the film started in June 2010 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. John M. Bennett and Lawrence Robbins are the producers of the film. The film stars Alessandra Torresani, Ambyr Childers, Johnny Pacar, Toby Hemingway, Jonathan Keltz, Jennifer Missoni, and Christian Slater.
On October 21, 1994, Harlan Diehl (Luke Bonczyk) murders his family at their farmhouse and he is shot by the police, as he kills his sister. The tragedy leaves behind video footage (which he had taped) and his sister's baby, who lives. Fifteen years later in Marshall, Michigan, an ambitious high school student Julian Miller (Johnny Pacar), is tasked with completing a film assignment on forgotten local stories for journalism class. Choosing the Harlan Diehl case, though it goes against the wishes of his mother, Anne Miller (Lisa Jane Todd), he selects his girlfriend, Riley (Ambyr Childers), to be his project partner, and borrows camera equipment and archive footage from his reserved former coworker at a video store, Quinn (Toby Hemingway), who has since become a news station cataloger. He also recruits his fun-loving friends, DeeDee Baker (Jennifer Missoni), Nate (Jonathan Keltz), and Brianna Baker (Alessandra Torresani) to re-enact the murder scene, allowing him to produce a gory slasher movie.
One night, Quinn watches footage from the aftermath of the tragedy, where Harlan is taken away after having been shot. Still alive, Harlan awakes as the video intercuts, leading to the spiritual possession of Quinn's body by way of video playback transmission. Besides cataloging footage, Quinn is paid by a perverted cop, Officer Frank Lyons (Christian Slater), to set up spy cameras to privately record teenage girls, using this chance to initially possess Brianna, who finds and looks into the camera. He begins to kill people, starting with a coworker at his news station. Meanwhile, Julian and Riley discover that Harlan, whose parents died when he was four, bounced around from foster home to foster home until he was adopted by the Diehls, and that he is the descendant of Louis Le Prince, the inventor of cinematography. They locate the Diehl house to record footage, in the process finding out that there was a baby in the family, omitted from the reports.