The Secret of Sinchanee

The Secret Of Sinchanee (2021)

Dir. and written by Steven Grayhm

Starring Steven Grayhm, Tamara Austin, Nate Boyer

 

I watched THE SECRET OF SINCHANEE as a Hail-Mary style random Tubi pick, based entirely on "hey, looks like there's some kind of monster or a giant bird or something on the poster." I knew nothing about it, had no reason to assume it was good, and much reason to assume it was probably garbage. Inadvisable, certainly; self-destructive, probably. But it is the kind of utter recklessness which is my legal right during Half-O-Ween, that magical time of the year when you can watch stuff you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole even in October.

And despite the consistent level of shocking doggerel that I post about here, there are movies even I wouldn’t bother with, and this would normally be one of them. It belongs to a broad category of about nine hundred million indie horror flicks which were seemingly released direct to the internet without a word starting in the late ‘naughts. They all look reasonably professional --mostly since cameras and sound equipment have evolved so much that it doesn't take a tremendous amount of skill to shoot a movie which looks basically competent-- they all have perfectly professional acting…* and not one of them has anything even the least bit interesting in it. Unlike the raucous, anything-goes zero-budget hokum of yesteryear, they feel respectable and responsible and crisply professional, movies that were made at the behest of career councilors, rather than fevered nightmares forced onto the screen by delusion madmen with delusions of grandeur. All of them, I assume, were cranked out by the self-reinforcing cycle whereby streaming services require content --a volume business wherein it doesn't particularly matter what content-- and consequently there's always money available for a first-time filmmaker looking to pad their resume to crank out a bland, mercenary horror flick about whatever, just to prove they can handle bringing a shoot in on time and under budget, and hopefully use it as a springboard to move on to more interesting things. You sell the result to Netflix or Tubi or somebody who buys 'em in bulk, sight-unseen, then they slap a generic title like THE UNDERNEATH or DEMON HOUSE or something on the cover along with a gloomy-looking picture of a scared lady cowering in an all-grey abandoned house, and presto, chango, content has been created. An algorithm has been fed. And there it is popping up when you search for "horror" on Tubi, adding quantity but no actual value to your lengthy selection process. Unless, of course, you take the plunge and just click anyway, at which point, well, you can't say they didn't warn you.

THE SECRET OF SINCHANEE doesn't exactly buck the stereotype, but it does feel at least a little more committed than I was expecting. Far from a mercenary effort to churn out content, it's almost a vanity project, a showpiece for producer-writer-director-star Steven Grayhm ("Russ -- Party Boy" in WHITE CHICKS), one of those longtime working actors who has had a perfectly successful 20-year career without ever quite hitting the big times. The surprise here is that his big Orson Welles moment reveals him to be a more-than-capable director, producing something with an unflashy but effective atmosphere, generally strong performances, and steady, intentional pace. It has an old-fashioned vibe, a serious-minded movie for adults without being pretentious or insisting it's about anything other than the pleasure of a good spooky story. With its snowy New England milieu (the lived-in, real-world locations help immensely to give it some weight and texture) and stately, slow-burning paranoid vibe, it kind of reminds me of a low-concept X-Files monster-of-the-week episode, which I consider a good thing. Or of the recent, grievously under-valued THE EMPTY MAN.

Unfortunately, the sturdy direction ends up being in service of a script that never takes off. The plot is one of those simultaneously undernourished and overbuilt things which can be summed up in a single sentence, or summed up in five paragraphs, and nothing in-between will quite work. Suffice to say, then, that it’s about this dude Will Stark (Grayhm, solid enough in a role which mostly just requires him to silently look uneasy) who is forced to move into his recently-deceased fathers’ house, and quickly begins to get mind whammy’d by the sinister forces which were also presumably behind a horrific tragedy from his youth. Grayhm approaches this bedrock-simple setup with a bizarre, almost lackadaisical indirectness, however. The movie maintains a holding pattern, circling becoming a possession movie without actually doing it, for a surprisingly long time, and in the process drawing in two detective characters (Tamara Austin [The Walking Dead] and Nate Boyer [former Seattle Seahawk and US Army Green Beret, DEN OF THEIVES]—both doing unusually fine work to make their characters feels worth investing in), who have a complicated, somewhat resentful relationship but still manage to work together while they gradually, um… It’s a little hard to explain from here. There’s like, this whole thing where someone Will used to know as a child has been murdered, and for some reason the detectives think Will is the killer and he acts sort of suspicious even though we know he’s innocent (unless he isn’t and it’s just not very clear?) and it all relates to this cult who worship an ancient American Indian spirit of death, except that actually they’re the descendants of colonial Satan-worshippers, and they want to kill the last members of a magical (and fictional**) Indian tribe called the Sinchanee, who are described as “a peaceful mixed-race tribe discovered to have a unique immunity to diseases brought to the new world” who were “liberated” when “at the turn of the 18th century, French and Native forces attacked an English Settlement at Deerfield, Massachusetts.” For some reason, this resulted in a situation where “for years, locals have reported unusual paranormal phenomena that to this day…. remain unexplained.” And that scans because everyone keeps getting haunted by this evil little ballerina girl, except that I think she’s Will’s sister who was horribly murdered when he was a child? And also there’s an evil mirror? And a haunted piano?

I honestly have no idea what’s up with any of that, and it’s the main problem with the film: it’s well-directed and well-acted, but this story is a complete mess, cluttered up beyond belief with characters it doesn’t need (the two detective characters contribute literally nothing to the plot, are not even present at the climax, and everything in the movie would have worked out exactly the same if they had not been there) and a jumbled backstory it is completely incapable of making use of (despite the four impenetrable paragraphs of explanatory text at the start of the movie, which are then basically reiterated verbatim by another character in the final act, none of the stuff about the Sinchanee being invulnerable to smallpox or an 18th-century French-and-Indian raid or a secret pagan cult actually end up mattering all that much. There is definitely a cult hanging around, I guess, but I was never clear on exactly what their deal was or why they would want to possess this one dude instead of just killing him. And it never ends up meaningfully altering the basic possession narrative at work here anyway. It would pretty much be exactly the same story if he was just haunted by the ghost of his crazy dad or something. Although at least the masks are pretty boss. Might get back into organized religion if they started handing out badass skull-faced masks on major holidays.).

 And even if you can get past all the clutter, it kind of bungles the structure, puttering about, skirting the edges of a possession story and framing it as a mystery for so long you keep assuming there's gotta be some kind of twist -- but there isn't, it's all bedrock-standard possession stuff, it’s just bedrock-standard possession stuff buried in a haphazard pile of all sorts of mostly irrelevant bric-à-brac, none of which adds enough texture to be worth it. For a while it seems kind of interesting to have two parallel stories, one about this nice guy getting haunted, and the other about the detectives who wrongly think he's a killer, but you'd need them to eventually intersect for that to have any kind of payoff, and since that doesn't really happen, it's all for naught. Instead the whole thing just feels fatty and dawdling, floundering around and throwing out characters and worldbuilding without a clear idea of how any of it could be constructively woven together into a satisfying narrative. It sort of feels like it was originally meant to be a TV mini-series --complete with all the meandering subplots and side characters and time-wasting that format entails in this current cultural moment-- all edited down into one way over-burdened movie, but also not edited down quite enough, because the flippin' thing is damn near two hours long. And there's just not enough payoff here, in terms of whammy or in terms of simple imagination, to justify 115 extremely unhurried minutes.

Still, it’s trying, and for a good half of the movie --when it was still unclear that all this was going absolutely nowhere interesting-- I was pretty into it. If it’s a swing and a miss, at least there was a swing, and that's about the best case scenario for a Tubi blind watch, so I'm inclined to be generous.  

And speaking of generosity, the movie ends with text saying it's part of a project to employ veterans and their families? So even if doesn't land as a horror classic, at least it succeeds as a New Deal-esque WPA project. Homies gettin' paid and all that. Maybe that's the real Secret of Sinchanee?

*One of the great mysteries of our time is the utter vanishment from this earth of that great 80's and 90's style bad acting that was full of enthusiastically alien line readings and brisk energetic nonsense. What happened? Where did it go? Did the dour seriousness of the torture-porn years just kill off our capacity for frivolous artifice? Is this the next step in human evolution, that we're just all gloomy and sober all the time?

** Grayhm is descended from the Weskarini Algonquin on his father's side, according to IMDB, so I'll try not to get too weirded out about his making up a new tribe who are vaguely implied to be magic, I guess? Anyway, at least they're the good guys, and the colonialists are the bad guys, or so the dialogue says although none of that ever really plays out in the story itself.