The Horrible Horror Vault: The one with tentacle zombies

 

 

Title: The Void

What Year?: 2016

Classification: Improbable Experiment/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

As I write this, I have once again gone until Monday without finishing a weekend post. This time, however, it was never in doubt what I was going to review, and this particular movie was in the lineup as soon as I revived this feature. It’s one that’s been on my radar for a long time as one of the strangest and quite possibly one of the worst movies I have viewed, yet always found that neither fully described the whole. (And I have Shanks, House and Death Bed as a baseline…) Now, I’m finally ready to take this one on, and needless to say, I’m not playing nice. I present The Void, and it is among other things the kind of film that could have been custom made to annoy me.

Our story begins at a house in the countryside, where a guy makes his escape from a group of rednecks. We then find the survivor at a rural hospital that’s about to close, under suspicion of multiple homicides. He’s watched over by a kindly doctor and a lawman who is already wary. Tensions rise when strange, shrouded figures surround the hospital, and a pair of vigilantes push their way in. In the midst of it, the patients and staff start to transform into Lovecraftian abominations, and the doc is picked off. The lawman is left to guard the survivors, including a mother-to-be who might be more than a sympathy hook, and it doesn’t help when he gets a call from the deceased and no longer so friendly doctor. It’s a long night of growing horror and quasi-religious imagery, where the only thing that’s sure is that none of this makes any sense!

The Void was a 2016 independent cosmic horror film written and directed by Canadian filmmakers Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie, known for horror and science fiction/ fantasy comedies including Manborg. The project was reportedly influenced by Guillermo Del Toro (see… Pinocchio?), who had been in casual contact with the filmmakers during work on an unproduced adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s novel At The Mountains Of Madness. The production was partly funded through Indiegogo. The film starred Aaron Poole as Sheriff Carter and the late Kenneth Welsh (see Of Unknown Origin) as the doctor. Gillespie was credited as supervisor for the film’s effects. The film was shown at Fantastic Fest in late 2016, and given a limited release in the United States, Canada and the UK in 2017. It received generally positive reviews. The film is available on digital platforms including the free Tubi platform.

For my experiences, I encountered this one through a casual viewing, after seeing it listed with some quite favorable reviews. As alluded, my immediate impression was unfavorable enough that I came back to it during the brutal countdown for No Good Very Bad Movies. In that maelstrom of kaka, it was inevitably sidelined by far more worthy contenders (see, again, High Tension, and for that matter Deadgirl). I thought of it again when I put together my capsule reviews for the Revenant Review ebook, but it was always “zombie adjacent” rather than a zombie movie, and again, there were others that were more deserving of attention for good or ill (compare, if anything, Contracted). Now, I’m finally back for a rematch, and I find it an oddly suitable companion to Wind Chill. On a certain level, this is an “evil twin” to it, except more like equal and opposite: Where that was a polished near-mainstream effort that would have benefited from pushing itself further, this is the kind of competent indie-horror effort that rarely declines to cross a line for its own sake, even when said lines are basic principles of coherent narrative. If it were my verdict to pass, I would send them both back for more work.

Moving forward, what’s front and center is that we have two concepts that could each have easily sustained the film on their own, which instead clash together. On one hand, there are the cultists, ruthless and genuinely cunning antagonists who are never presented as anything but human. On the other, there are the Lovecraftian abominations, done very well with an emphasis on their very corporeal nature. I have to say right here that the former are far more effective for the majority of the film. On that front, the first act is greatly aided by the cultists’ visually compelling costumes, which readily calls to mind the obvious real-life counterparts (and the darker elements of the underlying source material) without making this feel like a half-baked “message” story. My further editorial thought is that the abominations would have been more effective as a final-act reveal, which we do finally sort of get when the doc finally introduces a group of them in the subbasement. This is also where I have to make a further complaint: While the camerawork and storyboarding are linear enough that one can see where the creatures are and what they are doing within the environment, there’s still a trendy emphasis on poor lighting for its own sake. In this already late entry, the whole trend is conspicuously shown as what it was, an attempt by journeymen to revive an artform whose masters were long gone.

For the rest, what I decided was worth more detailed comment are the characters and story. This is precisely where actual quality becomes more frustrating than outright badness. The characters of Lovecraft himself  rarely rose above expendable exposition generators (the major exception being none other than Herbert West), which made for an acceptable conceit. Here, on the other hand, we see the bar raised to the standards of modern storytelling. These are characters we can like played by real actors, especially but not limited to Poole and Welsh. Their reactions are both rational and relatable from the outset, and we will see that they have plenty more pain behind them. Where things go off the rails is that far too many character and story points seem to come out of nowhere well into the final act. I may be bad at paying attention to these things, but this is egregious, to the point that I initially thought an entire scene was a “flashback” because I had not worked out that two characters were supposed to be married to each other. That, in turn, was all because a character is impregnated with an abomination without explanation before we know the actual pregnant lady’s real story. (I was going to go into her fate, but… just no.) My big rant, building on the last, is that these things could have been laid out in detail in the same running time as the first few monster attacks. The final testament to the outright redundancy is the doctor’s chilling introduction of his creations, which would have been there to do his bidding the whole time: “They want to die, but I won’t let them…” That is how a developed reveal works, so why did anyone think we needed to see anything but the creepy cultists before this?

Now for the “one scene”, there is one that truly embodies my issues with this film. Partway through, the lawman ventures outside, after the first of the abominations is dispatched, accompanied by the very paranoid vigilantes. Of course, the cultists are waiting, and this is their finest hour. We first see them standing in their white sheets, lit by the flashing lights of a patrol car. They all draw weapons, but only one seems to rush in for the attack. We get one of our closest looks at the black triangle all of them have over the face. A shotgun blast takes him down, and the lawman retreats. The camera flashes back to the cultists, and we see them still standing there, with absolutely no reduction in the evident threat. To them, this is clearly just a skirmish which they have already won. But what brought me right out of it is that the lawman does nothing about the downed cultist. It’s reasonably obvious that he is already dead or going to be, but surely there would be something to learn from at least a glance under the sheet. In fact, given the assumed small-town setting, it’s very likely that all of these guys (???) are people the sheriff would already know, something the film will never acknowledge or explore the implications of. And that is how you lose even a reviewer as mild-mannered as me.

In closing, I come to the rating, and this is where I literally punted. On my regular rating scale (which I never updated from The Revenant Review), this would be either 1 or 2 out of 4, very much depending on my mood. (As I regularly point out, just being on the scale is enough to separate a film from the actual “worsts”.) What finally stayed my hand is that I have seen how well it resonates with a genre fandom I have never quite been a part of. Beyond that, there are certainly strengths that I cannot easily address in my review format. The bottom line is, if you like this movie, I’m not the one who will tell you that you are wrong. I gave it a chance, and that much was what it deserved. That’s enough to call it a day.