Official Synopsis:
A tattooist unwittingly unleashes a forcible deadly spirit through an ancient Samoan tattoo tool. Now marked for death, he will need to uncover the source of the evil in order to save his new love, and recover his own soul.
  
Our Take:
It’s something I’ll never understand. You probably don’t understand it either. Why is it that in 90% of direct-to-DVD horror movies (The Tattooist included), nothing ever happens until after the 40-minute mark? Is there some unwritten rule out there that you have to include no less than 40 minutes of boring character setup before you can actually start the plot of your movie? It’s incredibly frustrating.

If The Tattooist were a straight-up low-budget flick about monster tattoos coming to life and killing people, I’d be down for the cause. But it’s not. It’s about Samoan tattooing and the release of an old ancient evil spirit, and it takes forever (or 40 minutes, to be precise) for anything even remotely interesting to happen.

Special features on the DVD include:

* Commentary with Director Peter Burger and Actor Jason Behr

* Deleted Scenes (5 minutes) – Three scenes.

* The Tattooist: Behind The Scenes (12 minutes)

* Behind The Tattoo Designs (2 minutes)

* The Colors Of The Tattooist (2 minutes) – Why not just combine this with the Design feature?

* Real Life Samoan Tattoo (3 minutes)

* Becoming A Chief (2 minutes) – Again, they should have combined this with the feature above.

Once we do get to about the hour mark of The Tattooist some cool evil tattoo stuff does start to happen (just think about the most serious infection a tat could ever get) but by that point it’s just not worth it. Who wants to hang around for an hour and a half just to watch maybe ten minutes of cool scenes?

Overall Picture:
Movie: D
DVD: B-

- Landen Chase Pelish
Staff Writer