I like it when movies pleasantly surprise me. I try to focus on movies that I think sound interesting, or have gotten good word-of-mouth, or have some historical importance, or have a premise that sounds interesting to me. Sometimes, however, when I’m having trouble settling on a film, I’ll default to something that looked…not interesting, necessarily, but slightly more novel than the average found-footage/zombie/demonic possession fodder that clogs up any streaming service out there. Maybe it’s from another country, or maybe the setting isn’t something that’s been totally overdone, or maybe the premise doesn’t sound quite as hackneyed, or shit, maybe I just like the thumbnail.
Whatever the reason, I generally don’t go into these with the sort of high hopes I have for my first-choice films, and there have been a few times I’ve given up maybe 10 minutes in because the writing or acting was so risible that I knew I wouldn’t be able to sit through the whole thing, but there’s always that hope that it’s going to be better than I expected, that I’ve found a diamond in the rough.
And that’s what makes The Devil Below such a frustrating experience. It’s mediocre on balance, but every now and then you can see glimpses of a better movie struggling to assert itself. It makes attempts to transcend its limitations, but it never really gets there.
We open on a couple of coal miners - one older, one younger - coming up to the surface, ready to end their shift. They’re father and son, and as it turns out, Dad’s in charge of the operation. His son’s asking for him to reconsider firing a miner who’s been screwing up on the job. Dad’s worried that he’s endangering the safety of the crew, and his son points out that he’s got a lot going on at home and losing his job is the last thing he needs…and just like that, something snatches the younger one from behind a container. His father tries to give chase but ends up getting jabbed by some large, barely-glimpsed talon, and injured, he is only able to lie there as his son gets dragged away.
Flash forward about 40 years, to a young woman looking over maps of rural Kentucky, noting locations, borders, roads and trails. She leafs through old newspaper articles about a massive underground coal fire that completely consumed the mining town of Shookum Hills. The fire still burns to this day (which is an actual thing) and the town - along with all of its residents - vanished without a trace.
The woman is Arianne. She’s a guide, someone who is very good at getting people places, no matter how remote or hostile. She’s been hired by Darren, a geologist at Cambridge, to get him and his crew to the former location of Shookum Hills. Darren thinks that there’s a very rare mineral in the mine that’s causing the coal they were mining to keep burning so hot for so long, and he wants to take samples, to publish a paper about it. So it’s him, Arianne, Shawn - another geologist with some…interesting…beliefs, their tech guy Terry, and Jaime, who provides security. The locals aren’t helpful, telling them that they’ve never heard of Shookum Hills, and soon enough, a car tries to force them off the road. Arianne shakes the pursuer and backtracks to discover an overgrown road off the main highway, at the end of which is an electrified fence. The kind you use to keep someone out…
…or keep something in.
The film does start with some promise - you’ve got four dudes and a woman going on this expedition into Appalachia to discover what happened to an old mining town. That strikes me as an interesting premise - I do love me a “group explores forbidden territory” movie. In lesser hands, this would have been about four posturing fratboys and the woman who ends up crumbling as soon as things go bad and maybe ending up a love interest for one of the other protagonists. In a much lesser movie, she’d have to go skinny-dipping or strip down to a thin, clingy tank top for reasons. But luckily, this is never that movie. None of the guys are especially annoying and Arianne, rather than being there solely to be put in peril, is tough, capable, and competent. And even better, she’s treated as such by the men. So they aren’t really reduced to caricature, as easy as that would have been. But on the other hand, there’s also not really a lot there to replace caricature. Darren…is English. Shawn…has some weird ideas. And Terry and Jaime don’t even have that. They aren’t much more than ciphers.
This dull functionality extends to the way they act as well. Their behavior sort of wavers between being sensible and believable and the exact opposite of that, depending on the needs of the plot. At some points they’re competent and professional and act like human beings would, and then at others they completely abandon that, not as a reaction or response to something that’s happened or because of some character flaw, but just because they need to do this now for the story to move forward. You basically have two groups - the protagonists, who have stumbled into a situation they don’t understand and have made it much worse, and locals, the remnants of the town’s population who have stayed behind to keep this threat contained. You can forgive the protagonists for being massively out of their depth, but the people who stayed behind, once things start getting bad, don’t really seem to have a plan despite having been tasked with containing this particular problem for the last 40 years or so. It seems largely like they exist to give us a couple of different groups to be menaced and picked off throughout the film instead of just one. If it’s possible, they have even less personality than the protagonists, and so it’s very difficult to get invested in them.
So you’ve got characters who have the potential to be something other than business as usual, but aren’t. On top of that, you’ve got a story that has the potential to be something other than just a monster movie, but isn’t. The film makes some feints toward being a story about science versus faith as explanations for phenomena. Darren is very much a man of science, but Shawn is a geologist who (somewhat improbably) believes in intelligent design, but apart from one or two on-the-nose arguments up front and some borderline-hamfisted dialogue later on, it’s never really developed, and it could be. Faith defies empiricism, which is fine as a way to find meaning in life, but is sort of crummy if you’re trying to figure out how something works, and science is constantly reevaluating its claims in the light of new evidence. A monster is just a species we’ve never seen before. That could make for some interesting character development (as it is in Final Prayer), but here it’s not really central to the story in a way that it could be. It’s just some stuff people say and then it gets forgotten until the next time somebody has to say something.
But I can forgive a certain amount of generic character or absence of thematic depth if there’s an evocative mood, or a real sense of tension or momentum to film. Get me caught up in the ride, and it’s easy to ignore the other stuff. But again, here, the film doesn’t really give us a lot to feel. The cinematography is fine, lots of overcast shots of abandoned mining territory and orange-lit cave systems, but when it comes down it, the potential weak point to any monster film is going to be the monster. You need a really big budget to come up with monsters that can remain convincing on camera for extended periods of time, and this film clearly doesn’t have either. For the first two acts it’s okay - you only get brief, shadowy glimpses and it doesn’t hurt believability. But by the climax they are by necessity on screen a lot, and it becomes very clear that it’s just some people in costumes and some dodgy CGI. The filmmakers try to paper over this with visual distortion, presumably due to the conditions underground, but it’s kind of clear that that’s why they’re doing it. It calls attention to the artifice, so it doesn’t really help. On top of that, the design of the monster…which we get a clear glimpse of in the second act as a sketch one of the locals made…is, frankly, silly. And that’s the nail in the coffin on that part of the film, right there.
So we have featureless characters in an openly mechanical story being menaced by an unconvincing threat, but probably the film’s biggest problem (apart from the third act, which is shapeless and disjointed and consists of a lot of things happening purely because they need to) is how it never really surprises the viewer. A few months ago I talked about Last Shift as a film that knew how to play sequences out of kilter with what audiences have come to expect, to generate real tension and surprise out of scenes that could have been very predictable. By contrast, this film plays it exactly how you’d expect. Every time. You see setups coming a mile away, and those setups do exactly what you think they’re going to do at exactly the moment you expect them to do it. Nothing about this film surprises apart from the characters not being quite as cartoonish as they could be, and the ending - while it had the potential to do something darker - ends as safely and predictably as any other film, made competently but without much imagination or vision, would.
Not all of this is the filmmakers’ fault. Monster movies are a tough proposition, and horror films rarely get the kind of budget you need to realize something truly inhuman in a way that’s going to be convincing over long stretches on screen. But the rest of it didn’t have to be this way. If you don’t have the budget for a truly spectacular creature, then give us characters we care about, or a story that dares to be something a little smarter than “people go into mine, get picked off one-by-one,” or creates tension through atmosphere or surprising choices on a scene-by-scene basis. But when you know what to expect, and that’s what you keep getting, it’s never going to rise above a level of dull competence. It’s a film forgotten as quickly as it is watched, and that’s too bad.
IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment