The DVD format, along with the ease of online marketing, has been a boon for independent filmmakers, who now can see their work gain a broader audience even if the film had a very limited (or nonexistent) theatrical run. As a reviewer, I've had the pleasure of encountering quite a few independent gems which in turn I can recommend to viewers. But for every overlooked gem or diamond in the rough come a few... shall we say... oddly shaped pebbles. Such a pebble is The Unseelie Court.

 The best part of The Unseelie Court is without doubt the title, which evokes the mysterious world of the fairies, also known as the Fair Folk... not the cutesy winged midgets popularized in the Victorian era, but the older, darker conception of the fairies as an elder race, dangerous to humankind, living outside the bounds of human life.

In fact, The Unseelie Court effectively evokes this fairy world with some evocative images of its inhabitants. The pale, strikingly made-up woman is shown kneeling in the forest, the traditional abode of the fairies, but also glimpsed with others of her kind in the corner of the bar; the suggestion is that these powerful figures of folktale and legend are still part of existence even in the present day.

That's as far as we get with the title and a few evocative images intercut into the film. Sadly, the actual story of The Unseelie Court is a stunning let-down from the promise of its title. Imagine wandering into a New Age bookstore by mistake. Trying to find the exit, you become lost in aisles filled with do-it-yourself astrology, Handy Numerology Pocket Guides, and treatises on how to find true love by wearing small pieces of purple crystal from your navel; then, to your dismay, you find yourself pigeonholed by a persistent stranger. Being a polite type, you try to make some sense of his story, but the fact is that it's an incoherent, paranoiac fantasy... and worst of all, it's as dull as ditchwater. Edging toward the door, you smile and nod, and make a dash for it as soon as you can.

Such is The Unseelie Court. I could go into more detail on the abundant cheesiness that can be found, such as the painfully faked "lightning" effects or falling rain that's clearly been digitally added (it's pouring down in buckets in the foreground of the image, but the pavement in the scene is bone-dry). That's all beside the point. The story itself consists of one character relating the "truth of the universe" to another, and suggesting a gigantic conspiracy to cover it up. I think we're supposed to find his ideas profound or at least thought-provoking, and conceivably it's the kind of thing that might sound kind of cool to college kids shooting the breeze at 2 AM while taking a break from a study session for Philosophy 101, but in the sober light of day it's just an incoherent muddle of new-ageish jargon with no particular surprise value. The film is only thirty-three minutes long, but viewers will be checking their watches before the end credits, just the same.

The DVD

It's important to note here that The Unseelie Court is actually a DVD-R: a recordable DVD rather than the silver pressed DVDs which are the norm. Only DVD players that specifically support playing DVD-R discs will read it; many older players will not. In fact, my Toshiba SD-2109 wouldn't read it, though fortunately I was in the process of expanding my system and I was able to play it on a Cyber Home 500.

The Unseelie Court comes with an insert explaining what a DVD-R is and how it compares to pressed DVDs in quality (equal). The insert contains a list of DVD players that will definitely not be able to play The Unseelie Court as well.

What if your DVD player can't read DVD-Rs? There is no provision for getting your money back or returning the DVD, which I consider highly problematic because nowhere on the cover of the DVD does it actually state that this is a DVD-R. That means that viewers might buy it not knowing that it might be unplayable on their machine... until they open it, at which point they would not be able to return it to the store. (Dreamdancer Motion Pictures blithely suggests that you buy a new DVD player, but I think that's a bit excessive.) To give credit where it's due, the Dreamdancer web site does clearly state that the disc is a DVD-R, and this is the likeliest place someone might buy the DVD.

The Unseelie Court is a Region 0 NTSC disc.

Video

The Unseelie Court appears in a non-anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen transfer. Apart from the jagged edges characteristic of non-anamorphically enhanced images, it's a passable transfer. The overall look of the film is very dark and shadowy, and the black areas are appropriately dark, with the contrast adequately supporting the detail in the image. Colors are slightly washed-out, but as the majority of the film takes place in a dimly lit bar, it's not like we have much of a chance to see bright, sunny colors as a comparison. The print overall appears to be fairly clean and free of flaws.

Audio

The Dolby Digital 4.0 is a case in point of "too much of a good thing." The surround channels are rather overused, with the thunder and other environmental noises sounding artificial rather than immersive. The rest of the track is a notch below average; the dialogue is natural-sounding, but often slightly muffled.

Extras

The Unseelie Court contains a substantial number of special features, though they are not particularly of interest to most viewers.

The film itself has a commentary from director Eric Muss-Barnes, who also narrates a forty-five-minute behind-the-scenes documentary. He begins the documentary by stating that he wanted to avoid doing the kind of "making of" featurette that he personally disliked: a lot of clips from the film interspersed with a few short clips of interviews. Great: I also find that kind of featurette annoying. Unfortunately, the resulting making-of is at the other end of the spectrum and is equally annoying: it's just miscellaneous behind-the-scenes footage, with barely any content that tells us about what's going on. It may be a fun "home movie" for the cast to reminisce over, but it is completely uninformative about the actual making of the movie.

Also included are a music video for the band Pipe Choir, who also did the music soundtrack for the film. Muss-Barnes tells us that this was his first attempt at any sort of filming or editing, and it's not terrible, exactly. However, the next short feature, an ultra-short film called "F(r)iends" co-produced by Muss-Barnes, is exactly that: terrible. "F(r)iends" does have a commentary track.

Rounding out the DVD are trailers for The Unseelie Court (actually making the film seem a lot more intriguing than it is in reality) and Losing Hope, another independent film from Dreamdancer; color bars with audio instructions; an isolated musical score; and a DVD-ROM press kit and script. The press kit includes some interesting material about the production of this shoestring-budget film, which would have been nice to have seen included in a more organized manner in the making-of featurette.

Final thoughts

Somewhere along the line of creating The Unseelie Court, someone had a few really intriguing ideas about visually representing the dangerous, attractive Fair Folk of legend. Even the idea of someone stumbling across the secret "truth" of the universe, and being punished for it, is interesting. It's in the execution of those ideas that The Unseelie Court falls flat; in the final production, there's literally about two minutes of intriguingly suggestive material and thirty-one minutes of badly-acted, horribly-scripted, incoherent story. With cheesy special effects, to boot. Even without considering that The Unseelie Court is actually a DVD-R (and will not play on some DVD players), I'd have to recommend skipping it.