Little Erin Merryweather (2003)

  

At the New England College campus the number of students is declining. Someone is killing them off one by one. Who is the mysterious killer and is there a pattern to the madness?

The story sounds simple enough and in a way it is. Fortunately, writer, director, actor and man of numerous other tasks David Morwick brings a couple of fresh ideas to the story. A group of students working for the college paper get a whiff of what’s going on. One of them, Peter Bloom (Morwick) initiates an investigation of his own. Perhaps he is the man to solve the great mystery? The detective is certainly no expert. Nor is he very capable of being pleasant, but I guess when bodies start piling up in an otherwise quiet little town everyone becomes a little testy.  Everyone reacts differently when someone they love die, but I wasn’t quite convinced by the reaction to the girl who’s boyfriend had just been slain. She also didn’t hear the killer lurking unlike her boyfriend. Perhaps she was too busy getting it on to notice? They are minor things, but still. I aslo highly doubt a teacher and former forensics expert would help her students in solving a murder. Note to self; it’s only a movie.

Little Erin Merryweather is a low-budget film, which shows. That is by no means a problem. There is much creativity here and the movie’s biggest asset is the storytelling. We’re told the story like the grim fairytale it is. It shows restraint in the murders avoiding the slasher label, which I initially thought was good. However, fairytales can be quite explicit, so maybe it would have worked to its advantage? Great illustrations have been added as well for our pleasure. You feel compelled to watch how everything will unravel. The killer’s red cloak makes for a sharp contrast to the snowy landscape. It almost looks like something that has been added digitally. While Merryweather never becomes particularly scary it does manage to create some suspense towards the end. What I did long for was more of a mystery around the killer’s identity. It becomes fairly obvious early on, so there is no big surprise at the end. We sit and wait for Peter or whomever to figure it out. You will still be interested though. Little Erin Merryweather is ultimately a sad story and answers one of the questions posed in the college psychology class; Are humans evil or can their future actions be traced back to certain points of origin? In a sea of bad horror, Little Erin Merryweather is a small ray of light worth investigating. 

6/10