Pengabdi Setan: Say Your Prayers

Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - the films I watch for this thing work in spite of themselves. On paper, they should suck. Hell, on film, they should suck. But there will be something about some of these films that just gets them over. Usually it’s a full-on commitment to whatever they’ve got going on, no matter how ridiculous. Films that just go for it often make it easier for me to get past their bigger flaws.

And Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave) is a perfect example of this kind of movie. It’s dated, crude, and unsubtle to the point of being hokey but damned if it doesn’t have its moments. It tells the story it’s going to tell with an earnestness that made it easy for me to overlook some very obvious shortcomings.

We open on a funeral. Munarto has just lost his wife Mawarti to some unspecified illness, leaving behind him, their son Tomi, their daughter Rita, and their faithful servant Karto. She’s being laid to rest in the family plot, and many have come out to mourn her, including one mysterious woman who stands off to the side, watching the family. They return home to grieve and begin the process of getting on with their lives. Only Tomi is visited in the middle of the night by a specter, a ghoulish distortion of his mother, who scratches at the window and terrifies him. He says nothing about this to the rest of his family, but when he tells a friend about it, his friend advises him to seek out a fortune teller, who can give him advice about spirits. And so he does, and the fortune teller tells him that his family is in great danger. She tells him the best way to protect himself and his family is through the use of black magic.

So Tomi picks up some books and starts chanting and meditating on the dark arts. This upsets Karto greatly, because he’s a devout man who thinks Tomi should spend his time praying and sending blessings to his later mother. Meanwhile, Munarto recognizes that Karto, as faithful as he is, is also ailing. So they’re going to need some help around the house. He’s a prosperous businessman, so he has the resources to hire a housekeeper. And days later their new housekeeper, Darminah, shows up at the front door, ready to move in and start work.

She’s the woman from the funeral.

So we’ve got a restless spirit, a kid practicing black magic, and a mysterious figure who seems to be up to no good. That’s plenty, and one thing I’ll say about this film is that it isn’t convoluted or overly fussy. Bad shit happens and keeps happening. That’s the brief (well, for the most part, but more on that later). It’s not especially cerebral or sophisticated, and in fact, everything about this film is unsubtle or even downright crude. The acting is melodramatic, the dialogue is stiff throughout (even allowing for the vagaries of translation), and the special effects are primitive even for the time in which it was made. But for all of that, its crudeness also gives it a real kick in places - not as consistently as I’d like, but there are definitely some really striking moments and set pieces here. The color palette is largely shades of garish, and the soundtrack is full of ambient swells and feedback and cavernous booms that seem more like industrial noise than a soundtrack, and the crudeness of the effects and makeup work give it an unsettling outsider feel. At its best, it taps into the same kind of gonzo strangeness that made Messiah Of Evil so good, though never to the deliriously nightmarish heights of that film. And for every moment that doesn’t really work (there’s a nightmare sequence that’s downright comical), there are more that do. There are some jarring tonal shifts that just add to the overall weirdness as well - moments that feel like they were spliced in from a movie about the lives of swingin’ teens in 1980s Indonesia, before the whole thing returns to a feeling of nightmare.

That’s at its best, though. Sometimes the flaws are harder to overlook. In terms of pacing it feels like it drags in the middle, and it’s marred by a few instances of characters completely forgetting or disregarding something inexplicable that occurred right in front of them - not so much like they’re in denial as like a reset button got hit or something. There’s a, well, let’s say casual relationship to continuity here. There are creepy moments sporadically throughout the beginning but the tension gets lost for a bit, and though the climax does a lot to make up for that, again there are some moments in the heat of things that come across as maybe a little sillier than the filmmakers intended. And the whole thing ends with a moral that blows right by subtext into the territory of flat-out text, one laid on so thick and with such a heavy hand that it sort of comes all the way back around to being almost endearing and nostalgic, like a callback to an even earlier age of filmmaking, where all kinds of sensationalism could be excused if you ended on a note that was edifying to the masses.

And that’s the interesting thing about this film for me - it only succeeds sporadically, stumbles a fair amount, and falls flat on its face at times. But I was on board for the ride because there’s something about its operatic earnestness and utter lack of nuance that I think sort of works for it. If it reminds me of anything, it’s of a fable - an instructional story intended to teach a moral lesson, and fables aren’t really about nuance. Say your prayers, this film says, or the monsters will get you. And there’s something kind of appealing about something that unpolished.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

The Changeling: Family Matters

Ghost stories are, for the most part, stories about the past. Someone lived here and though they are long gone, something of them remains. Or, something very bad happened here long ago and the restless spirits of those caught up in it are unable to move on. Every now and then you’ll get one that puts a bit of a different spin on it, but ghost stories usually come down to solving the mystery of what happened long ago that keeps the presence or presences haunting a particular place from moving on.

And in that sense, The Changeling is, for most of its duration, a classic ghost story. It’s very much about the past, not just in its story, but also how it tells its story, and in the signifiers of the time period in which it was made. When it’s in classic ghost story mode, it works quite well, but when the focus shifts elsewhere, it stumbles in the home stretch.

John Russell is a pianist and composer on vacation with his wife and daughter in snowy upstate New York. Their car has broken down and they’re pushing it off to the side of the road so John can find a phone and call for a tow. But spirits seem high and everyone seems to be making the best of it. John spots a phone booth, and his wife and daughter occupy themselves with a snowball fight on the shoulder of the highway. But what this means is that they don’t see another car swerve to avoid a semi truck and plow right through them. All John can do is watch from the phone booth, horrified.

Some months later, John’s relocated to Seattle to take a position on the music faculty at a local university. He’s still adjusting, still breaks down into tears sometimes. Everyone is sympathetic. He’s looking for a house to rent until he puts something more permanent together, and an acquaintance puts him in touch with the local historical society, who have a property they can lease to him. Someone from the society shows him around what is referred to as the Carmichael estate. It’s huge, palatial and sprawling, with a wonderful music room. It hasn’t been occupied in about twelve years, and the previous occupants left some things behind. Books, mostly. Truth be told, it’s probably too much for one person, and so John finds himself rattling around in this gigantic house. Just him and his grief.

Him, his grief, and mysterious noises in the middle of the night. Doors that open and close by themselves.

Everything about this film is rooted in the past. To start, it was released in 1980, so it’s set in a world very different from the one we live in now. Everyone smokes, you call information to get someone’s phone number, and John records his compositions on a big reel-to-reel tape recorder. So there’s a bit of quaintness to it in that sense. But then, on top of that, it’s very much a ghost story in the gothic tradition, and being a ghost story, it’s about something that happened long ago at the time of the film, so you’re watching a film about the past intruding on a present that’s now very much the past in the style (mostly) of an even older storytelling tradition.

And for at least the first two-thirds of the film, does a pretty good job of being a ghost story in the gothic tradition. A lot of little things do the work here - doors opening and closing by themselves, mysterious banging noises, closed-up rooms thick with cobwebs, all set in this enormous old house, dark wood, a vertiginous central staircase, stained glass, a seemingly endless warren of rooms and hallways. Performances are a little mannered as befits when it was made, but not so as to be distracting. It’s more just a rhythm and pace to the dialogue that you really don’t hear much anymore, and it’s tempting to say that the house is the real star of the film. That might be going a bit far, but this is one of those films where the long, dark silence of a big old house is interrupted by small, strange things, like jabs at your calm.

And so the house does a lot to sell it. It sits in the middle of a bunch of bare, leafless trees, skeletal in the middle of Washington state’s lush evergreens, it’s all big empty rooms and long stretches of corridor that the film uses very much to its advantage with continuous pans and long Steadicam shots, the camera gliding through the mansion like the ghost itself. The soundtrack is all classical music, quivering strings and dissonant piano - it’s not subtle at all but it’s also rarely overbearing. The tendency toward long shots of the mansion’s interior is offset by a clipped, almost brusque editing style where one scene will crash right into another. It’s jarring, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not - it creates at sense of uneasiness and temporal dislocation at times, but other times it feels sloppy, like a scene crudely edited out.

And this does, to a degree, extend into the narrative - relationships between characters develop quickly, events move really fast (sometimes defying plausibility)  and some characters are whisked out of the story immediately after being introduced. It’s a little on the longer side, but doesn’t really feel like it until the third act when the focus shifts. And it’s this shift that I think represents the biggest problem the film has. John devotes himself to uncovering whatever happened in this house so long ago to leave a restless spirit inhabiting it, and it ultimately abandons the moody, tense ghost story of the first two acts to spend too much time focusing on a cover-up and conspiracy driving the mysterious events of the rest of the movie. Ghosts are typically restless spirits that are the result of some past tragedy or injustice a spirit that can’t rest, and that’s fine, but what should be a final revelation, a coming together of all of the pieces and the discovery of actual proof of this horrible secret ends up getting tangled up in something closer to a political thriller, and it kills the momentum and the atmosphere pretty quickly just when it should be tightening up. It almost feels like what should have been the whole movie got compressed into the first two acts. What’s more, the exposition starts getting pretty clumsy in the third act  -there are more than a few instances throughout where people tell instead of (or worse, in addition to) showing, but there’s a lot of it at the end, and things start getting muddled, happening just for the sake of happening without really fitting into a cohesive narrative as well

Had it stayed the course, I think it would have been very good, but as it is it does feel like it sort of sputters to an ending. It feels very much of its time and so it does threaten to feel quaint, but when it works, it works very well in a mode that still has a lot of life left in it, even if it has been left behind for more bombastic efforts. I think it’s a good argument for old-fashioned ghost stories still having some life left in them. Well, at least it is when it's focusing on the ghost story.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi 

What We Like, Redux: The Blackout Experiments/Haunters: The Art Of The Scare

I’m going to do something a little different this week - some of is due to circumstance (the film I’d intended to write about was such a bust that I ended up dozing off in the middle of it, which is a sign to me that maybe I shouldn’t write about it), but also something that’s been percolating away for the last couple of months. Back in September, I watched a film called Extremity, about an unstable young woman going through an extreme haunt (also known as “immersive horror experiences”) and all of the terrible ways it goes wrong. The film itself was a pretty mixed bag, it started strong and then fell flat on its face with a ridiculous third-act twist, but it got me thinking about real-life immersive horror experiences again.

It's intuitive to think of extreme haunts as your traditional haunted-house attraction turned up to 12, but I don’t think that really captures what’s going on. A lot of them are closer to immersive theater or performance art than that, and make demands of the participants that aren’t anything remotely close to what you get at your traditional haunted house or haunted corn maze or haunted hayride or…you get the idea. And so, in following my curiosity, I watched a couple of documentaries - The Blackout Experiments is about Blackout, one of (if not the) first immersive horror experiences, and Haunters: The Art Of The Scare is mostly about the history of fairly traditional haunted house attractions, but also centrally features McKamey Manor, one of the most notorious extreme haunts. And I came away from these two films thinking about how well they also outline some of the different ways in which people approach horror films. I haven't thought about stuff like this in awhile, so it seems like a good time to revisit it.

The Blackout Experiments

This documentary follows the experiences of three people as they go through Blackout for the first time, and then follow them as they continue to go back, over and over again, charting their emotional journey and relationship with the event. It’s run by two people with theater backgrounds - founder Josh Randall is an alumnus of the Tisch School for the Performing Arts - and began with the idea that it was getting harder and harder to really, genuinely scare people in a haunted house setting, so Randall and collaborator Kristjan Thor started thinking about the conventions of the haunted house. One of the things they observed was that it’s standard practice that the actors in these attractions not physically interact with the guests. And so they wondered…what would be possible if the performers were allowed to touch the guests? And what if it were built less around stock-standard ghouls and witches and ax murderers, and more around deep, real fears? 

The result is something best described as confrontational. It’s minimalist, run out of an office space marked only by three dots on the door to indicate what’s there. Guests have to sign a waiver and submit clean bills of health (physical and mental) to qualify for attendance. Until fairly recently, it was an experience designed to be gone through alone, though they’ve started doing group events. You’re asked about your background and your fears as part of the application process, and so to some degree the experience is personalized, intended for you specifically to go through alone. You arrive outside their building at the intended time, the door opens, and hands snatch you and drag you inside. You’re shoved against the wall, and so it begins.

In many ways it’s the antithesis of the typical haunted house, in that there’s little to no décor, and not a lot of props, just very dark rooms filled with the omnipresent performers, who do indeed touch the participants, shout at them, bark orders and restrain them as needed. Participants witness (and take part in) tableaux that are less your standard monster-movie stuff than situations that put them on one side or another of a power dynamic played out in ugly, immediate fashion. In fact, the whole thing has strong element of psychodrama and kink to it. There’s a safe word that immediately and irreversibly ends the experience, and you get the sense that a lot of the ordering around and holding people in place or pushing them up against the wall is as much about their safety and managing the experience as it is about creating an atmosphere and the safety of the performers. It gets very heavy - there are elements of breath play, mock executions, even waterboarding. This is not for someone looking for spooky fun, but nor does it seems to be gratuitous brutality for the sake of shock. Most of the film is seen through the eyes of Russell Eaton, who eventually attends multiple Blackout events, and we sort of follow his journey from his first visit to what is presumably his last one, a bespoke event staged specifically for him, in his own house. 

His isn’t the only story featured - there’s another young man who taps out after a few with the sense that maybe they pushed a button he wasn’t ready to have pushed, and someone whose attendance starts reminding his partner - an addiction counselor - of addictive behavior. But Russell’s is the most fully realized. He introduces himself as someone who had a troubled childhood and who is comfortable with darker experiences. They might not be okay for everyone, he says, but he thinks they’re okay for him. He seems a little self-conscious. But Blackout seems to do something for him, there’s something cathartic or revelatory for him about being confronted with his deepest fears and insecurities and coming out the other side. So he keeps coming back. He’s eventually invited to join a “Blackout Survivors” group - people who’ve had repeated experiences going through it, where they share their feelings and insights, talk about what it’s done for them. It’s something like a support group, but you don’t get the sense that any of them are suffering. They’re enjoying community, enjoying being able to talk to other people about something that only they  could understand. His relationship to the experience goes up and down - there’s an especially intense part to one experience that feels to him like a breach of trust, but he comes back, and it’s interesting to see where it ends up, and for Russell at least, it seems transformative.

The creators seem to be pretty thoughtful about what they’re doing - they try out any new elements on each other first to see what would make them most effective, and as they’re discussing what they’re putting together for Russell as his custom experience, they discuss his specific fears and consider whether or not specific elements might be going too far. They seem to be aiming for something, trying to evoke a very specific experience that pushes limits in a safe way. And I think that’s why I came away from watching this even more curious about experiencing Blackout. The idea of pushing beyond your limits, confronting your deepest and darkest fears and anxieties and vulnerabilities in a way that is fundamentally safe seems compelling to me. Harrowing, but in a way that has the potential for growth.

Haunters: The Art Of The Scare

Conversely, this film is mostly about the more commercial end of the haunted house industry - and this film really did illustrate for me how much of an industry it really is, complete with people who are professional “scare actors,” for whom this is full-on seasonal employment. Sometimes it’s commercial in the sense of mass appeal, the varying degrees of homegrown events put on by enthusiasts at a financial loss (and in the case of one featured creator, some strain on his marriage). These are hobbyists with a genuine love and enthusiasm for coming up with ideas, improving on what they’ve already done, looking forward to October every year and putting things together in their garage for the community to enjoy. And then sometimes it’s commercial in the sense of big budgets and licensed IPs for the sake of making a profit, as in the case of Universal Studios’ annual event, an extension to an existing amusement park.

Either way, it’s the rollercoaster type of scare - actors in makeup and costume leaping out at people, relying on startles and pushing traditional buttons with mostly the traditional types of monsters and archetypes. You’ve got your ghosts, your witches, your zombies, your werewolves, your masked axe murderers, and the participants move through these mazes where things pop out or they walk through rooms (safely separated from the performers by railings or partitions) where you see moments you’d expect from any number of horror movies play out. The participants shriek and scream and then giggle and clutch each other. It’s a thrill ride, like any other thrill ride, something that spikes your adrenaline for a little bit, but that you probably won’t take home with you.

And then you’ve got Russ McKamey, who runs McKamey Manor. He established it first in San Diego, and then after running afoul of a number of zoning and licensing issues, now runs it at locations in rural Tennessee and Alabama. McKamey Manor is billed less as an immersive horror experience and more as an endurance test, one where a $20,000 prize ostensibly awaits someone who can go the full ten hours, which nobody has. What glimpses we get remind me a lot of extreme underground horror films, the kind that forsake plot and character development for set pieces of extreme violence and degradation for its own sake. There’s lots of verbal abuse and people being drowned or force-fed things, being caged or locked in boxes, muzzled and blindfolded with duct tape. Honestly it looks like an attempt to reimagine the haunted house as something closer to a snuff film. Participants have to sign a waiver acknowledging the possibility of everything from having their heads and eyebrows shaved to dentistry without anesthesia to possible bodily injury and death. Participants wear humiliating adult-sized onesies for the whole experience, and everything is recorded with highlights going up on McKamey Manor’s website and social platforms. The other, more commercial haunted house operators look down on things like Blackout and McKamey Manor, not seeing the “fun” in it - to their minds, people are paying to be tortured and think it’s sick. And honestly, when it comes to McKamey Manor, I kind of agree. It seems less like people are being scared than it is that they’re being brutalized, that it’s more about how much they can take than how they’re engaging with it. But their perspective also assumes that the purpose of a haunted house is the easy jump-scares, the horror equivalent of empty calories. And I’m not sure I’m on board with that either.

And just as the creators of Blackout have backgrounds in theater, Russ McKamey is, first and foremost, a showman. He makes his living in a variety of ways, including as a wedding singer and DJ. He loves to perform, and McKamey Manor is all theater. He doesn’t do it for the money - admission is one bag of dog food, which he donates to an animal rescue charity - and he operates year-round, with an ever-growing waiting list. The creators of Blackout don’t do too many interviews, and participated minimally in the documentary because they want to preserve a sense of mystery about the experience, but McKamey puts himself front and center throughout the whole thing. He loves the spotlight and he knows how to play to it. But unlike Randall and Thor, McKamey plays fast and loose where Blackout doesn’t - he only started allowing safe words very recently, and moved the operation someplace where they told him in effect “if they signed a waiver, you’re covered.” He’s received a number of complaints, including cases where performers ignored safe words and ended up injuring participants. More troubling to me is that he uses former participants as performers, largely untrained, many of whom are assisting in potentially dangerous things because, as they cheerfully state, they want to put other people through what they went through. Part of being willing to push people to their limits is acknowledging the existence of those limits and knowing what is and isn’t safe, and all of the obvious theater aside, it really does seem like McKamey is playing with fire in a way that Randall and Thor aren’t.

And so, in these two documentaries, I see examples of ways in which people engage with horror film. The big-budget commercial attractions are a lot like big-budget, mass-appeal horror films. They’re engineered to the nth degree and rely on familiar jump-scares for the purpose of entertainment and profit. Plenty of people like that stuff - that’s why the budgets are able to be big. But they don’t really do much for me. It’s not fun to me to be startled and not much else. McKamey Manor, on the other hand, is a lot like underground horror. It’s low-budget brutality without context or larger meaning, a barrage of graphic brutality for people numbed to anything else. That’s not really my deal at all either. I have no problem with graphic violence in horror, but it’s a tool, not the point. Blackout, on the other hand eschews bombast, spectacle, and the obvious, unsettling by going directly to the source of our fears and insecurities and doing just what it needs to in order to pluck that nerve. And that is absolutely my thing, which might explain why I’m generally bored by the first type and disgusted by the second, but fascinated by the third. People come to horror to be entertained, to be subjected to ever-increasing stimulation (and to develop a perverse machismo about what they can endure), and to be moved to something, however uncomfortable, that might change how they see the world.

The Blackout Experiments
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

Haunters: The Art Of The Scare
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

Barbarian: There Goes The Neighborhood

My biggest complaint about Hellhole last week was its complete and utter absence of surprise. It tells exactly the story you think it’s going to tell in exactly the way you think it’s going to tell it (until the very end, but that almost sabotages the film rather than helping it), and I think the only reason I wasn’t able to anticipate actual lines of dialogue was that it was subtitled from the original Polish, and cliches often get lost in translation.

So this week I have Barbarian, which…it doesn’t exactly have the opposite problem, but it doesn’t not have the opposite problem. Basically, it’s an ambitious effort that does a number of things well in a novel fashion, but isn’t quite a slam-dunk because some of its more audacious moments don’t quite land.

Tess is in Detroit for a job interview, for a position working as a researcher on a documentary film. She gets in late at night, and she’s confirming details for the AirBnB she’s rented. She texts them that she’s there, they give her the code to the key safe, all good. She parks in front of the house - a cute little one-bedroom place - and opens up the key safe, only to find it empty. Then it starts to rain. Locked out of the house in a strange city in the middle of the night, in the middle of a rain storm, the night before her big interview. So she goes back out to her car to try and get it sorted out, when she sees a light go on in the house. She runs up and starts pounding on the door, and a man opens it up. His name’s Keith, and he booked the same house for the same night on HomeAway. They’ve been double-booked. So that’s awkward.

So it’s just Tess…a young woman in a strange house in a strange city in the middle of the night, finding herself face-to-face with a stranger who just happens to be there already. He seems friendly.

He asks Tess, “do I look like some kind of monster?”

It’s hard to talk about this one in much detail,  because the less you know about it going in, the better. Seriously, don’t even look at the IMDB listing before you watch it if you can help it. It’s a film that takes a couple of sharp narrative turns that contribute as much to a sense of overall uneasiness as the events of the story itself. They aren’t twists, exactly - in some ways this is actually a very straightforward story told in an off-kilter way. But the off-kilter narrative approach works to the extent that it wrong-foots the viewer, denies us the comfort that comes with the familiarity of a certain kind of story. You think you know how this is going to go, but you don’t, not really.

That said, just like it’s really a pretty straightforward story, it’s also got some pretty conventional beats to it, at least at first. It even lays it on a little thick at first with lots of ominous music and startles accompanied by sharp musical stings, but about halfway through the first act it starts to settle into a good sense of restraint. Once the initial obviousness is out of their system, .the filmmakers know when to let a setting or a detail or a reveal do all the work without overplaying it, and Tess is smarter than your typical horror-movie protagonist, acting exactly like a woman in a rented house with a strange man would reasonably act, even to the point of upending one particular horror cliché to a degree that got a laugh from me. And the story itself is told in crisp fashion, with very little wasted time or energy. Little moments convey a lot. It’s one of those stories where the details all slot together into a larger narrative mechanism, where little things end up being important later in a way that doesn’t feel contrived. The shot gets held long enough that you know this is going to mean something later, but it’s not usually clear exactly what, so when the payoff comes it’s satisfying. There are a couple of beats you’ll see coming, but they aren’t large ones, and there are just as many that will surprise.

It’s got a well-considered visual sense too. It’s shot mostly in shades of deep shadow and gloom, with dimly lit interiors to the house, nights that are solid black except for the sparsest of streetlights throwing the smallest pools of light, overcast days and long, dark corridors, with a soundtrack of deep synthesizer swells and prickly high frequencies…except when it isn’t that at all. About all I can really say is that it’s a film of contrasts, many of which work to drive a sense of discomfort and foreboding through sharp tonal shifts in the filmmaking. And most of these work, though not all. They’re jarring, but not too confusing. Where I think they’re the least effective is around the characters. Most of the performances are suitably restrained and grounded, but there’s at least one that is overly broad, to the degree that this character feels dropped in from another movie. It’s easily the film’s biggest liability, and I think that’s because the character sort of brings that other movie into this one, in a way that undercuts the dread and uneasiness managed by the first act. You get the sense that it’s trying to mix horror and comedy the way something like Us did (and did much more effectively), but where Us punctuated horror with stabs of comedy in a way that elicited nervous, otherwise-I’m-going-to-scream laughter, this film sort of shifts gears into comedy and backgrounds the horror instead, and that loses some of the film’s biggest strengths. The character is pretty well-realized and a more grounded take on it could fit really nicely into this film, but as it is it’s pretty distracting. One of the narrative turns could have benefited from being a little more fleshed out too, it communicates something economically (this film’s mostly pretty good about showing instead of telling) but I think going a little bit more into it could have restored some of the unease lost during the second act. And as the film goes on, it’s also a little on-the-nose with its messaging about suburbia and urban decay and the dangers of being part of a minority group in the face of institutional indifference. Not that that’s a bad note to hit, not at all, but it’s a little obvious in that respect and though not enough to ruin the movie, it was a little distracting.

As weird as it sounds, I’d like to see the filmmakers tackle something a little closer to conventional horror, because there’s evidence here that they have the chops to pull that off with style. What we have here is sort of a mixed bag, but in an interesting way. When it works, it works quite well and has some audacity to it, which is nice to see. Not all of the audacity works to its benefit, but I’d rather see a film screw up trying to do something interesting than screw up by bungling the obvious and predictable.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
 

Hellhole: The Clue’s In The Name

(Just as a heads-up, I’m probably going to end up spoiling most of this one, but in a way it doesn’t really matter, because it’s nothing you won’t already see coming. This is in no way a subtle or surprising film.)

A good title can sell me on a movie. I’m a sucker for cryptic, oblique, understated titles (e.g., Hereditary, The Blair Witch Project) but every now and then there will be one that just begs viewing if only to find out what the hell it’s all about (e.g., The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Beyond The Black Rainbow). I think the problem, for me, is the ones that sort of fall in between, where they’re just sort of generically descriptive. Those don’t really spark the imagination, so it’s hard to imagine that the film will either.

This is one of many problems with Hellhole. It’s a film that is as dull, formulaic and obvious as its title would lead you to believe.

The film opens in Poland, in 1957. It is a dark and stormy night, and a car pulls up to a church, and a priest gets out, carrying an infant in his arms as he heads inside. He brings the child up to the altar, and proceeds to ask God for forgiveness as he pulls out a dagger. He’s going to kill the child, who has a strange birthmark on its shoulder. The police burst in and tell him to put the knife down. He tells them that they don’t understand, that this “evil seed” must be destroyed, and they gun him down for his trouble. If you’re wondering where you’ve seen this before, it was the end of The Omen, in 1976.

Flash forward thirty years, and a priest named Father Marek arrives at a monastery located way out in the sticks. They’ve largely been forgotten, or left alone, because they make a point of running a sanatorium for people who suffer from demonic possession, exorcising their demons and caring for them as they recover. As the prior sees it, it’s a necessary service that nobody wants to admit to. Father Marek is given a habit, a rosary (he brought his own), and his suitcase is searched. It’s very important, given their line of work, that earthly temptations are kept far away. His cigarettes and cell phone are confiscated. The evening meal is some kind of foul-looking gruel, dark and pasty, with…chunks…in it. Not that you expect ascetics to eat well, but this is especially unappealing.

After dinner, once he’s returned to his cell, Father Marek opens a hidden compartment in his suitcase. There’s a gun and a flashlight, and some news clippings about a series of mysterious disappearances in the area. The monks may have something to hide.

It’s a very dark movie. Not in the sense of sinister or brooding, just…underlit. It makes sense, since it’s a monastery, but it doesn’t help things. There’s some good, gloomy atmosphere toward the start but the rest of the film largely takes place indoors where everything looks the same. And this sameness is pervasive. I said up at the top that this film has many problems, and that’s not strictly true. It has one really big problem, in that it doesn’t have a single original or unpredictable bone in its body. You’ve seen all of this before, and it’s going to go pretty much exactly how you expect that it will, with an exception toward the end that doesn’t really help its case. As a result, there’s no tension, no surprise, and although it’s only 90 minutes long, it still feels like a slog.

It’s oddly devoid of tension, even in moments where there should be tension. Marek witnesses an exorcism that proceeds almost by rote - a young woman is bound to a bed, there’s prayer, she rears up and starts growling and convulsing, the bed starts shaking, and the prior’s crucifix bursts into flames. At no point does anyone evince anything stronger than mild concern. Most of them seem almost bored, and it certainly doesn’t look any different from any other exorcism you’ve ever seen in a movie before. The dialogue is serviceable (though the translation does make everything sort of an understatement) as are the performances and the soundtrack. Nothing special, but nothing awful. Just sort of there.  It’s just as rote in its action - Marek goes poking around where he shouldn’t be, not everything is what it seems, something spooky happens, rinse, repeat. And if that isn’t clear enough, the first act ends with a conversation (held in a confessional, because of course it is) that spells out what anyone actually watching the film has already figured out. No, Marek isn’t really a priest, he’s an undercover cop investigating the disappearances, which appear to be tied to the exorcisms they perform - exorcisms that the possessed inevitably don’t survive. Yes, of course they figure this out, and yes, the revelations you expect to follow - about Marek, about the monks, about what they’re really up to - they’re exactly what you’re anticipating them to be. There’s more to Marek than meets the eye (like the weird birthmark on his shoulder), it’s not by chance that he was assigned this case, and so on.

Normally I don’t like spoiling films that I’m writing about. Whether I liked it or not, someone should be able to watch it and decide for themselves, but this film is so predictable that anyone with any familiarity with the genre will, like I did, see every single beat coming. Until the very end, wherever you think the story’s going to go, that’s where it goes. There IS sort of a twist in the third act, and in theory it’s one for which I have sort of a perverse appreciation, but it’s handled so anticlimactically, it lands with such a thud that it’s actually more comic than anything else. In that moment, it almost felt like the film was shifting course to become a spoof of the sort of film it had been sincerely up to that point. Which is certainly a choice, though I can’t say it’s a good one.

And then THAT twist is reversed, but the filmmakers don’t bother to offer any narrative logic for it, almost like they realized that otherwise the film won’t have an ending, just a bunch of monks standing around saying “welp,” so nope, that didn’t count. I do have to give the film credit for not copping out on its ending (which contains the only interesting imagery in the entire film), but it’s far too little, far too late. The climax takes place in a cave under the monastery, around a well that is a portal to hell. A literal hellhole. It is a hole...to hell. This is what we have to work with here.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix