The Dark Red

 The Signal is a pretty underrated anthology film from 2007 about a rage virus-style apocalypse; I liked it a lot. Out of its three creators, David Bruckner made The Ritual and some other anthology films (all good), and is now working on the new Hellraiser; David Gentry's done a few indie films which honestly look pretty great (I will check them out) and Dan Bush's directed, among others, the fun but flawed The Vault (a film I don't remember much of except that I liked it right up to a really stupid ending.)

 The Dark Red is Bush's follow-up to The Vault. It's a Stephen King-style tale of people with psychic powers being victimized by a shady conspiracy that, unfortunately, doesn't work. The movie, I mean, not the conspiracy. Like The Vault, it's well-made enough to raise hopes that the good bits will make up for the rough patches and all the waffling, but it fizzles out badly in the third act.

 It begins promisingly enough, with a social worker investigating a mobile home and finding the mother dead and a toddler locked away in a trunk. Then it cuts away to a some sort of institution where that kid, Sybil (April Billingsley), all grown-up, is locked away and is trying to convince a psychiatrist (Kelsey Scott) that she's not crazy, she has mind powers that let her read other people's minds, and that a conspiracy stole her baby and is now coming for her blood. You can imagine how that goes over.

 These sessions between Sybil and the psychiatrist unfortunately take up most of the movie. When not being bloated with unnecessary lines to pad the movie's runtime (forgivable given the movie's obvious budget limitations, I guess), the conversations serve as an exposition device as Sybil tells the story of how she met a dashing young man (script co-writer Conal Byrne) at her mother's funeral, got knocked up, and then was betrayed by him as he handed him over to a seemingly mom-and-pop illuminati operation that's trying to harvest psychic blood (of an unknown blood type... really?) for their own gain. Totally relatable relationship issues.

 Sybil's flashback to a drugged escape from the organization's remote cabin and underground tunnels that serve as the conspiracy's headquarters is the movie's highlight - badass and suspenseful - and it sets up high expectations for the climax.

 Unfortunately, once she's out of the hospital, the rest of the film consists of Sybil preparing and executing a deeply stupid plan to get her baby back. Seriously, after all this setup, you'd think they could have come up with something that isn't this inane. But of course the movie acts as if it was a good one, and it works flawlessly. So our protagonist gets to the cabin and faces down the world's shittiest, least menacing psychic new-world-order conspiracy ever.
 Again, you've got to take the budget in consideration here, but... they had a few more extras for other scenes, at least use them here to punch up the finale with a higher body count. Anything.

 The acting is kind of stilted in a very... "I'm a serious actor being all serious in a very serious role" way. That's in keeping with the film's overtly sombre mood, and it's not bad thing in a b-movie, necessarily, but it does make the characters a bore, leaving nothing to latch on to there when the plot is so simple  and so many of the scenes are just conversations. There's very little in the way of special effects, but what's there (the decomposing corpse at the beginning, a couple of bloody injuries) look great.

 As it is, the film's failure to deliver even a mildly satisfying payoff to all that slow, slow setup ends up sinking it. Even before that, the worldbuilding doesn't hold up to any sort of scrutiny (there's no consistency or believability to the reach and menace of the conspiracy or to the powers of the bloodline.)
 Joe Begos's The Mind's Eye had a similar no-frills approach to a Stephen-King-derived psychic fantasy, and it delivers way more fun on what was probably a fraction of this film's budget. I'd start there before giving this one a go.