what a fuckin' year. Is it over yet? Christmas was a nice respite from thinking too hard about it, but it's still just keeps on churning whether we want it to or not. Time to drown out the horror of reality with some...other horror. Maybe just entrenching myself in dark, disgusting, ugliness, and maybe when 2021 ticks over things will seem that much brighter.
9
The Void
2016, d. Steven Kostanski, Jeremy Gillespie - amazonprime
The Story (in two paragraphs or less)
A small-town Deputy Sheriff finds a young crackhead unconscious on the side of the road. His only choice is to take him to the hospital where his estranged wife is working. They separated after their child's stillborn birth, and there's still unresolved issues between them. Also at the hospital is an injured young man, a nurse, a nurse-in-residence. the chief surgeon, a pregnant teen and her grandfather. Very quickly strange things start happening... the nurse stabs the injured young man in the eye and peels her own face off before attacking the sherrif deputy. She eventually mutates into a hulking fleshy beast that they need to fight off. The crackhead slits the surgeon's throat and despite dying he rises again. Meanwhile, outside a coven of murderous, dagger-wielding, white robed cultist are preventing their escape. Deputy Sheriff is getting visions of an unknown world and a triangular shadow in the sky, among other things.
Eventually the horrors start arising fast and furiously, reality is not what it seems. The surgeon is behind it all...he talks about loss and bringing back those who were lost... and the horrors he's gladly performed to do so. A powerhouse like Kenneth Welsh was the right choice to sell this. Everything goes gnarly, and it's all very gross and shadowy with flickering lights and flares and tentacles and such. It's an elder thing awakening, madness striking everyone, and no real rules to play by.
Why this?
A few recognizable Canadian names and faces, plus the director was on a podcast talking about unmade Lovecraft movies and brought this up. I was curious.
What's good? I like that it wasn't a cheap "people held hostage and gripe with each other" movie. It was that but within 20 minutes the first sign of things going horribly awry was already in your face. And within the next 10 minutes the first big gross creature was put on display. It was off from there. Also, the first person we see in this is Evan Stern (Roald from Letterkenny) which put me in a good place. I was hoping with Ellen Wong (Scott Pilgrim, The Christmas Set Up) that there would be some more humour to this, but it's deadly serious, which isn't a bad thing. I think it captures Lovecraft very, very well.
Oh, and Kenneth Welsh sells the nefarious doctor speech very well. I actually bought into his logical madness.
It was also hard to pick a poster to accompany this. They're all pretty great.
Not so good…
Any sort of action against the physical monter effects doesn't look great...the cues the actors had to take in order to combat the gross creatures obviously needed very precise direction, but it leads to very clunky editing.
The bad thing
The nebulous, ominous, triangular Void of the title, was very very sinister, especially delivered through the visions the Deputy Sheriff was having. It has no origins or personality of its own but the film uses it as iconography very well.
Franchise potential:
Lovecraft-like stuff doesn't usually lend itself to franchise, except under the umbrella of Lovecraftian horror. This didn't really deliver an adversary of any real note, more just an ominous thing coming. And none of the protagonists that survived were of any real note either that would make us want to see more.
Did I like watching this?
Not really. Madness is a hard thing for me to get into with horror, because there's no logic behind it (hence, madness), so there are no rules to play by. Things happen which defy logic, except to say "madness". And it's so full of gross stuff. I like a more clean horror. That said, this was pleasantly well done for low-bud Canadian production, shot in Sault Ste-Marie, with its effects crowd-funded via Indie-go-go... it looked pretty good.
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