Scar 3D

Listen up, proles! 3D cinema is here and it's going to drag your two-dimensional, technologically-inferior arse kicking and screaming into the 21st century whether you like it or not. Films will no longer be confined to a flat screen; a 3D Zac Efron will take every opportunity to grind his package in your face; perverts will find a new appreciation for Jessica Alba's three-dimensional breasts; Adrien Brody's gigantic nose will loom large over terrified audiences. It's the future, and it's going to be fucking brilliant.

Except of course, that's bollocks. The idea of seeing a film in 3D still conjures images of berks wearing blue and red glasses, jumping at images that lurch out of the screen like modern day versions of those backwards hicks who thought a speeding train was about to smash through their cinema. Technology has moved on from the medium's iffy early days - it's not just space aliens and animated sharks that appear in the third-dimension, rather intricate and layered entire scenes - but the exploitative nature of the films that use it remain the same. Which brings us to Scar 3D: a stab-by-numbers slasher movie and supposedly the first movie to be created in HD-3D, which for all its fancy numbers and letters, basically translates as 'we know the movie's crap, but how cool is this?'

Imagine a slasher movie in 3D. Go on, imagine it. What do you see? Yeah, I thought so. Masked killers jumping out of cupboards while easily pleased audiences jump in mock-terror. Knives being swiped in three dimensions. Blood shooting out at the screen. In all honesty, the idea of a 3D slasher movie doesn't sound so bad; certainly a more appealing prospect than sitting through Saw VI: Zombie Jigsaw's Return. Why, then, does Scar 3D almost entirely fail to make the most of its fancy technological DNA? Which bright spark decided a torture porn gore-fest was the way to go? Aside from a few neat tricks, there's literally no reason this film was shot in 3D. It's no better in three dimensions than it would be in two.

The plot is so stultifyingly insulting, I won't bother to repeat it here, but will warn you that you've seen it a million times on late night cable channels (that's you, Zone Horror) and scrawled in the back of countless film student text books. Young girls, serial killers, torture scenes, yada yada yada. Atrocious acting doesn't exactly sweeten the deal, neither does a script that serves up turd after turd after turd. Actors are prone to flailing around their arms and projecting theatrically to squeeze every ounce out of the 3D medium, wafting objects towards the camera for added effect but succeeding only in make the film look like some bizarre techno-panto. The less said about the painful plot contrivances the better: how exactly does one snap off their thumb in complete silence? The sole high point? 3D tits. The porn industry is going to love this technology, presuming you don't mind wearing stupid dark glasses while masturbating.

Enough about the film: it's a stinker through and through. The 3D tech, though, is another matter. REAL-D, as it's known, is literally an eye opener. It's far from perfect - images still tend to ghost, particularly whites on black - and the mesmerising effect can take some ocular readjustment, but essentially it works. This is what 3D should look like. One simple scene, probably not even included intentionally, sees Angela Bettis' character walking down a flight of stairs towards the camera. It's eerily real; fully 3D images that sail over the uncanny valley with ease. Whether or not REAL-D will benefit 'serious' films unwilling to exploit that extra dimension remains to be seen, but the ground work has been done for action movies of the new millennium - just wait for James Cameron to really blow your mind with Avatar in 2009.