He Never Died

He Never Died (2015)

Dir. and written by Jason Krawczyk

Starring Henry Rollins, Steven Ogg, Jordan Todosey, Kate Greenhouse, Booboo Stewart

I’ve often lamented on this blog that a mystery is --almost inevitably-- going to be more satisfying than a solution. This is something of a catch-22, of course, because a mystery without a solution is often equally unsatisfying, a long come-on followed by a coquettish rebuff. But how, in this world of savvy filmgoers, are they really going to come up with a mystery intriguing enough to capture our fascination but unusual enough to actually surprise and satisfy us when the inevitable explanation rolls around? It’s a classic dilemma: a mystery is an irresistible means to energize any tale, but we’ve seen so many mysteries that picking out the possible solutions in almost any film is child’s play for a jaded filmgoer. An out-of-the-blue solution with no basis in what came before is frustrating and unfair, but a well-supported solution is instantly predictable and dull. Attempts to deal with this problem have resulted in solutions which run the gamut from disastrously idiotic (THE MAZE), to despondently inevitable (THE OTHERS), to the intentionally vague (ZODIAC), to the infuriatingly movie-negating (SHUTTER ISLAND), to the downright unimportant (VERTIGO).

Sometimes the movie is still real good, obviously, but the solution is still something of a disappointment. I think I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve seen the a satisfying solution pulled off successfully. But I guess I’ll have to get some toes involved soon, because fuck me if HE NEVER DIED isn’t a superbly engrossing mystery with a solution every bit as bold and startling as the journey by which we get there. I should have known we were in for a good one, because while DARK WAS THE NIGHT had an awesome title font and then proceeded to be one of the worst movies of the year, HE NEVER DIED starts with a proudly low-rent title font that makes it look like the credit sequence to an early 90’s TV show. It doesn’t give a fuck about that shit, cool fonts are beneath notice to this lumbering giant of badassness.

Before we talk about the plot, though, let’s take a moment and bask in the glory of the following sentence: This is the movie Henry Rollins was born to make. It’s been a well-established scientific fact that Rollins is history’s greatest man since back in his days as a Washington DC Haagen-Daaz assistant manager, and he’s been in a steady stream of movies since the end of his tour of duty as singer for the seminal hardcore band Black Flag. Everyone has always known he was a powerful elemental force, but up til now no one had yet figured out how to actually harness that power effectively, like solar wind or Ryan Reynolds. He’s been a cyberpunk in JOHNNY MNEMONIC, a prison guard in LOST HIGHWAY, a mob bodyguard in HEAT, a 4-wheeler driver in JACKASS 2, a badass survivalist in WRONG TURN 2, and also a real-life detective in WEST OF MEMPHIS. But aside from helping to give Steve-O a painful tattoo and getting the West Memphis Three released from prison, his film roles up til now hadn’t quite managed to generate the kind of potency he is obviously capable of.

That changes here. As Jack, the mononymic hermit living in a cheap apartment and limiting any contact with humanity to its barest minimum, Rollins is finally able to capitalize on his unique superpower for stoic intensity. Jack is a man of routine; he pays his rent wordlessly in cash, he eats a strictly vegetarian diet at a local diner, he plays marathon bingo at a small-stakes local church, and spends as much time as possible sleeping. But he’s also a man with secrets; he has a steamer chest filled with very, very old antiques. He doesn’t drink alcohol, but the way he looks at a glass of beer, you know this hasn’t always been the case. And his dreams --which we hear, but don’t see-- are filled with screaming and violence. Oh, and also, maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, but he’s also bribing a med student (Booboo Stewart --I’ll give you a second to adjust to a world where someone has that name-- from X-MEN DAYS OF FUTURE PAST) to supply him with bags of human blood. Hmmm.

His simple rhythm is disrupted by two forces which insert themselves into his life. The first is the appearance of his teenage daughter (Jordan Todosey, Degrassi: The Next Generation), who he’s never met, but who is very insistent on spending a little time non-consensually bonding. Jack is irascible and solitary and does not take well to his new housemate, but doesn’t seem to have the wherewithal to get rid of the persistent young woman. Meanwhile, he has another problem: for reasons unknown to him, he keeps getting stalked and hassled by gangsters and has to beat the tar out of them and not give a fuck. In fact, he seems about equally annoyed by both unwanted presences in his life.

Not giving a fuck is kinda his thing. He has very, very little inclination to acknowledge or respond to any other human being, even the cute diner waitress (Kate Greenhouse, minor parts in TV shows and stuff, although she did star in the interesting-sounding THE DARK HOURS) who might as well be flirting with his eggplant parmesan for all the response she’s getting. With great effort, he’s capable of holding a basic conversation and only seeming a little off, but his interest in picking up on social cues or meeting other peoples’ expectations of him is virtually nil. Only when the situations escalates enough to disrupt his routine does he reluctantly start to get more actively involved in dealing with shit.

That doesn’t sound like a a lot of fun, but half the charm in the movie is watching Rollins’ annoyance and bafflement that he has to deal with any of this. Every answer someone drags out of him seems to require intense concentration, and his demeanor suggests he’s constantly calculating whether it’ll take less effort to continue to unconvincingly fake a conversation, or just punch the person in the face until they go away. It’s a great weirdo role, as perfectly suited for Rollins as THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH was for David Bowie, in the sense that the character is in a lot of ways a perfect summation of both the actor’s public persona and personal quirks. Rollins is already an uncomfortably intense, awkward obsessive, and those qualities are amplified here to terrific comic effect, but also a subtle pathos. For all his quirky charm, Jack is totally isolated and disaffected, lost in the endless monotonous doldrums of a life with no purpose. He’s been doing it so long that he barely remembers how to even pretend to be human, if, indeed, he ever knew.

Who, exactly, Jack is, and what has made him this way, are the movie’s defining questions, and writer/director Jason Krawczyk (little-seen crime thriller THE BRIEFCASE in 2011 and a couple shorts) portions out little hints at the perfect pace to keep us hungry but never frustrated. But there’s more going on here, too; just why is it that these gangsters are so keen to pick a fight with him? And who’s the mysterious, sinister figure that only he can see? What’s up with the mysterious scars on his back, which his daughter seems to possess as well? Strangeness on top of strangeness. Not all of these questions will be explicitly answered, but the movie provides exactly enough explanation that you can draw your own conclusions -- a setup which is usually the perfect cocktail of preserving some degree of curiosity while still providing the satisfaction of some revelation. In this case, though, it helps that we do get one definitive answer, and it’s a fuckin’ doozy. Whatever it is you think is going on here, I can pretty much guarantee it’s not quite what you imagine.

But while the mystery provides structure, the film is equally a strange character piece, an awkward comedy/drama about whether or not Jack’s going to be able to find his way out of the comfortable hole he’s dug for himself and reclaim some of his humanity. Several people in his life -- the medical student who wants to be his friend, his daughter who wants to know her father, the waitress at the diner who just wants some stable companionship -- are reaching into his den, trying to pull him out, and he seems both reticent and somewhat torn, like he knows better than this, but a part of him still can’t seem to entirely reject the outside world.

Bingo!

Where this all goes is just as unexpected as any of the movie’s surprises, but I want to talk a little about it so I have no choice here but to get into SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER territory. Seriously, you’ll be a lot happier knowing as little as possible going in, and since there’s really not any chance of you seeing this thing for awhile (I got to see a very early screening at the AFI Spooky Movie festival this year, again, my life is dope and I do dope shit) I really urge you to refrain from reading any further til you do. So right now, this is for me more than anyone else.

SPOILERS AHOY. OK, so the most interesting thing about this whole movie is that it doesn’t quite go where you expect in terms of the drama, let alone mystery. When gangsters kidnap Jack’s daughter and tell him they’ll kill her at midnight unless he shows up, you figure it’s time for him to cowboy up, kick some ass, and reclaim his humanity. But he just doesn’t seem to care. Or at least, not enough to do anything about it. He seems a little sad, but he’s philosophical about it. You can’t help but sort of hate him for being so selfish. His indifference starts to make more sense when we learn a little more about him, though. Even in this spoiler section, I’m not going to explain exactly what his deal is, but suffice to say, you’ve already guessed from the title and a few hints early on that he’s some kind of immortal, supernatural entity. What differentiates HE NEVER DIES from basically any other movie I’ve ever seen is just how old he is. Jack, it seems, is old enough to consider Louise from SPRING a total n00b to be pwned. I mean, how could you realistically ask him to care about his daughter when he’s seen whole generations, whole civilizations --everyone he’s ever met and cared about even a little-- wither and die? Just like SPRING, actually, HE NEVER DIES finds a central conflict in whether or not Jack will be able to give in and allow himself to reconnect to life anyway, even if he knows it will end in heartbreak, even if maybe he can’t bear to see yet another love come into his life, only to wither and die while he persists, adding one more painful memory to those dreams he keeps having.

MORE SPOILERS AHOY! The difference between this one and SPRING, though, is that Jack comes to the opposite conclusion; or, rather, has the opposite result thrust on him. When the adorable waitress who’s been trying to reach him the whole movie finally hears his whole story, she’s not relieved, she’s horrified. This will obviously be the end of their relationship. Living forever inevitably isolates you, turns you into a monster who can’t possibly care about people anymore. Living forever means you eventually do everything, including all the worst things that people are capable of. “I’ve killed 9-year old kids for no reason at all,” he says, matter-of-factly. You expect a movie like this to end with some measure of understanding reached, but the gap between Jack and a normal human experience is just too great. He can’t bridge it, and he’s finally learned that painful lesson enough times that he doesn’t even try anymore. Hell, he probably learned it centuries ago. But cruelly, there’s still that tiny little human part of his brain that tugs on him, that makes him wish and wonder, even though he knows there’s no point to it. Makes him --completely against his will and his better judgment-- get involved anyway, occasionally. But it’s to no avail. He’s not going to ever have a relationship with either of the women in his life who are mistakenly trying to crack his shell. He has to pay the waitress to help him once he finally decides he’s gonna make an effort to save his daughter. And when he finally understands why she’s been taken, it becomes obvious this is all his fault, blowback for a crime he committed years ago and probably hasn’t even thought about since. The end makes it clear that if there is, indeed, a lesson to be learned from his centuries of limbo, he certainly hasn’t learned it yet. And maybe there isn’t even a lesson at all, maybe this is simply the dispassionate sadism of a universe even older and more disconnected than he is. END SPOILERS, END SPOILERS.

Anyway, HE NEVER DIED is fuckin’ great. It wobbles only towards the very end, when it struggles a little to find a suitable climax for a man for whom nothing means very much. But its bold, darkly philosophical grace note at the end is --if delivered in a manner ever-so-slightly clumsy-- still more than enough to redeem everything. The film itself was obviously made on the cheap. More than just the font strongly evokes a no-budget 1990’s indie crime drama. It would have fit right in between THE MINUS MAN and A LIFE LESS ORDINARY (though it’s better than both) save for Rollins’ recent shock of bright white hair. The filmmaking appears to somehow be blissfully unaware that an entire generation of color-corrected filters, rabid avid editing, and gloomy realism in acting has interceded between 1995 and now. But in a way, that’s part of its charm; the unassuming, point-and-shoot style and very slightly affected acting serves the movie well. It establishes a strong baseline of the movie’s inner reality, which is something of a gritty fairy tale, but, blessedly, one with absolutely no tiresome modern meta pretensions.

If you would enjoy a film where a bingo-playing supernatural Henry Rollins reluctantly goes to war with some small-time gangsters, this gives you the best imaginable version of that. If you wouldn’t like that, there’s no apology here, no effort to be hip or disaffected or postmodern so they can later deny that they really meant any of this. Like Rollins himself, the movie is so earnest and direct in its approach that it’s both off-puttingly funny and kinda endearing -- but also plenty capable of prickly aggression when the occasion arises. HE NEVER DIES is not a movie which will ever have a legion of fans, but I think it has cult classic written all over it, and deserves about 6 DTV sequels, each cheaper and more ridiculous and heartfelt than the last. Which is why I’m super excited that apparently they’re planning a god-damn miniseries. I’m usually strictly a movie guy, I don’t go for these newfangled Television box things, but here’s a case where I’ll obviously have to make an exception. Who says old guys can’t keep up with the times every now and again?

Finally, a mystery with a truly satisfying solution.

By the way, I'm pretty sure they just slapped a normal picture of Henry Rollins over the wings from the cover of the Slash-produced NOTHING LEFT TO FEAR.

Have a look:

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: Blood. Bullets. Bingo. and It's Hard To Live When You Can't Die.
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No.
• SEQUEL: First in what apparently may end up a mini-series!?
• REMAKE: No
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: USA
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: "Boo Boo Stewart" has been in both X-MEN and TWILIGHT franchises.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Rollins has done FEAST, WRONG TURN 2, and DEVIL'S TOMB. Does that count?
• BOOBIES: None
• MULLETS: None
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: None
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: No
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Debatable.
• EVIL CULT: None.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: None
• VOYEURISM: Nah
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Still pretty high, but hopefully once it hits wider release it'll find its audience.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: HE NEVER DIED should do a crossover with John Lydon's character from CORRUPT.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Borne out by the events of the movie.

ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A, although she'd definitely have been into this one.

Dark Was The Night

Dark Was The Night (2015)

Dir. Jack Heller

Written by Tyler Hisel

Starring Kevin Durand, Lukas Haas, Bianca Kajlich

DARK WAS THE NIGHT opens well. I like the font of the title, and I like that little drawing of the scary hand thing. Good hustle, right out of the gate. Unfortunately that is literally the last moment in the entire runtime which features anything commendable on-screen. I kinda hate to really lay into a little indie production, which I’m sure was motivated by genuinely desire to make a good movie. But I gotta call ‘em like I see ‘em, and this is, simply, a movie with nothing, nothing whatsoever, to recommend it.

It’s not for lack of ambition. In fact, you would never guess it from the finished film, but the script, by Tyler Hisel (2013’s lions-eat-white-people found-footage debacle SAFARI) was apparently included on that prestigious Hollywood Blacklist of highly-respected but unproduced screenplays back in 2009. That makes it sound pretty impressive until you remember that the same year, DUE DATE, RED RIDING HOOD, THE WATCH, and THE VATICAN TAPES were also on that list. But fair’s fair, I can see why someone could read this script and imagine a good movie. It’s an ambitious horror script, especially for a monster movie, because it focuses its attention much more on the painful personal lives of its protagonists than it does on monster attacks. In fact the monster doesn’t even show up til the movie’s final minutes; most of the runtime, it’s all about that subtle, implied horror of something unknown, something you can’t see. To wit: the people of winter-bound Maiden Woods, NY* are seeing signs that something is amiss. Animals acting strangely, mysterious tracks appearing around town, claw marks on some old dude’s barn. Meanwhile, sheriff Paul Shields (Kevin Durand, LEGION, COSMOPOLIS) is trying to keep the citizens calm while dealing with his own grief and guilt over the loss of his son and subsequent separation from his wife (Bianca Kajlich, HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION, but don’t hold that against her).

This could all be in service of a tense, unsettling tale of psychological pain with flourishes of horror, but an emphasis on icy, existential dread. Something in the vein of THE BABADOOK, or CURE. It could have been. But it isn’t. The script has that ambition, but its handling of this scenario is as rote as it’s possible to conceive of, and despite its emphasis on drama, the characters are all desperately one-note regurgitations of threadbare cliches. For fuck’s sake, every movie cop has a photo of a dead relative in his wallet that he sadly looks at while feeling guilty. Stretching a hacky genre staple into a feature-length movie is a dangerous enough proposition in itself, and Hisel does nothing whatsoever to expand on the basic premise or tease any meaning from it. It’s just the normal scene of an unshaven movie cop, sitting on his bed staring intensely into the middle distance feeling guilty and hoping for redemption... except instead of one scene it’s 50 minutes of 90 minute movie. Nothing interesting comes of it, he’s just kinda glum and mopey for a long time and eventually there’s a monster.

Who put Dave Matthews in a horror movie?

Even so, I think you could make a decent movie out of this premise with direction strong enough to overcome the thin script. Horror doesn’t require elaborate writing so much as a robust command of cinema, and I think the intention here is to be a bleak, stripped-down mood piece. With a masterful control of atmosphere, the gloomy characters might at least seem appropriate, if not independently interesting. That’s what’s being attempted, I think: Director Jack Heller (the little-seen thriller ENTER NOWHERE, executive producer of BAD MILO!) is aiming for the understated, icy dread of a DON’T LOOK NOW or HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, where the mundane is made ominous through a careful use of cinematography, editing, and music. An ambitious goal, to be sure, but unfortunately the movie just plain does not have the talent to back it up. Heller simply lacks the chops it takes to use the power of cinema to evoke the unease a movie like this needs to take flight. The filmmaking is as pedestrian as movies come, and occasionally outright amateurish. There’s very little actual horror in the script -- it’s totally reliant on the direction to create an eerie atmosphere in which to lay out its gloomy personal drama-- so when the direction stumbles, then, there’s nothing to fall back on. Nothing. It becomes a sad-sack, repetitive low-budget mumblecore misery porn which turns into a cheesy monster movie in the final 5 minutes.

It’s a shame, in a way, because of course you want a horror movie like this to succeed. I’m sure Heller was trying to do a good job here, trying to make something serious and mature, something that unsettled. But there’s a reason most horror films don’t try for that. If you make a tits-and-bloodsplatter gimmick slasher movie and fail to use the full power of cinema to provoke unease deep in the soul, that’s OK, you still got tits, bloodsplatter, and gimmicky slashing. If you make a quiet, intimate film about guilt and fail to use the full power of cinema to provoke unease deep in the soul, you got nothing. And almost immediately, the seams start to show.

See, the times when there were only one set of footprints, those times the monster was carrying you

I was willing to grant it a little leeway at first; Durand’s working pretty hard as the lead, even if he doesn’t have anything especially interesting to work with. Lukas Haas (MARS ATTACKS) has even less to do as his sidekick, another burned-out cop with a tragic backstory which is equally insipid and unimportant, but he’s trying hard too. The cinematography by Ryan Samul is ugly and drab --a shame since he’s been doing such great work with Jim Mickle recently, especially the handsomely lensed COLD IN JULY-- but that’s mostly explained by the debilitating flatness of the color-corrected images and the cheesey editing (one can’t help but wonder if the producers ruined some decent shots in post, as they did to poor Gabriel Kosuth on DYING OF THE LIGHT and god knows how many other movies over the last decade). Mostly it’s not actively bad, it’s just monotonous and derivative. You can deal with that for a while -- you know, low budget movie, can’t expect everything to be money shots. They spend a lot of time teasing that something cool will come along, you think, maybe they’re just building up to something awesome that will make the long wait totally worth it. But as minute after desolate minute ticks by, it becomes increasingly obvious that nothing is going to be able to save a movie this empty.

Eventually, the tipping point comes and you just can’t help but start to feel insulted by just how little effort is being made to keep you entertained. And gradually you start to see what you first took for an attempt at low-key mood building as simple laziness. Was this a legitimate failed effort to make a chilly, tense suspense piece, or just an excuse to grind out low-effort genre content for netflix so they can run up their numbers without paying for a real movie? I can’t answer that question, but if it looks like a sub-SyFy-Channel hack job, plays like a sub-SyFy-Channel hack job, and sucks like a sub-SyFy-Channel hack job…well, maybe it is exactly what it looks like. I can’t guess at the filmmakers’ intentions, but I can give you the standard checklist for crappy low-budget SyFy-channel wannabe bullshit: Ugly, desaturated monochromatic look. Check. B-list actors (at least one of them little-seen since the 90’s) spend the whole movie mumbling through one-note non-characters. Check. Monster is A) American Indian legend B) the result of man’s trespass on nature, or in this case C) both. Check. Check. Check. Monster is hidden in shadows and by shaky cam, but occasionally runs blurrily right in front of the camera’s field of vision accompanied by a loud musical sting. Check. Ridiculously low bodycount and no gore. Check. Monster finally appears in the last 5 minutes, looks like shit, and is brought to life by crappy CG. Check. More producers, executive producers, and co-producers than principal cast. Check. Cop with a tragic past? Climax in a church? That scene where something scary blocks the light underneath the bedroom door? Hunters in the woods get eaten by unseen force? Sudden realization once you get a good look at the thing that there’s no possible way it could have done all the spooky shit it was doing before we could see it? One check after another.

That last one is a personal pet peeve of mine, and I’d like to take a minute to address it here, if I may. Don’t you just hate it when the monster or killer or whatever is deliberately obscured and it’s doing all sorts of crazy shit, circling around hunters invisibly too fast for them to see, grabbing someone from inside a car, sticking its victims in the tops of tree… and then when you actually see it it’s a big lumbering lizard which can’t even manage to kill two dorks in an empty room? I mean, this thing would obviously not even fit in a car, much less have the strategic focus (or even desire) to pull off a maneuver like that. I officially call bullshit on this lazy practice. If you’re gonna show your monster doing impossible things when I can’t see it, you better be able to convince me it could feasibly do those things when the big reveal comes. If you have to make it totally change up it’s MO at the end because doing the same stuff would seem ludicrous once we can actually take a gander, congratulations, you’re the real monster here. (This one is especially egregious because they make a big deal about the mysterious tracks it leaves, which are of a distinct “three-cloven hoof.” Guess, what, when you actually see the foot, it’s not a fucking hoof, it’s just a regular dinosaur foot like you’d expect these big lizard dudes to have. Look, if you guys can’t be bothered to even remember the details of your own stupid monster movie, how can you expect us to take it seriously?)

Given all that, I was absolutely stunned when I saw a handful of good reviews of this thing, including from longtime friend of the site and film criticism’s second greatest troll Fred Topel (sorry Fred, as long as Armond White remains alive you’ll never quite reach the top of your game). All the positive reviews cited the film’s restraint and focus on drama as a selling point, but while I can understand applauding a film’s ambition in this regard, I defy anyone to try and claim the actual substance of the movie succeeds in generating either the tension or the drama it aspires to, or either of those things, at all. The most I can bring myself to concede is that Durand actually gives a pretty good performance, but unfortunately it’s in service of the most ridiculously trite movie cop cliche of all time. Yes, it’s a slightly atypical horror movie (although not that atypical, especially given the renaissance in the last few years of vastly superior microbudget horror-dramas like RESOLUTION and ABSENTIA) but surely just atypical isn’t the same as actually good? I can’t see how any sane person could claim the approach here actually pays off in any meaningful way, especially since the drama we spend so much time pondering is so completely and utterly divorced from the actual horror elements. Things like THE BABADOOK or THE CANAL or IT FOLLOWS (all of which are vastly more eventful than DARK WAS THE NIGHT, despite their reputation as restrained psycho-horror) all expertly weave the psychological aspects into the structure of their internal horror mechanics; DARK WAS THE NIGHT feels like a dull drama which is superficially grafted to a routine monster movie; the two impulses never play off each other thematically.

Anyway, just being clichéd and cheap and lazy doesn’t automatically make it bad -- I’ve enjoyed movies way dumber and more incompetent, and recently. But come on, you gotta give us something. This offers only the clichéd filler parts of a movie, none of the actual genre goods. It’s not just an unimaginative B-movie, it’s an unimaginative B-movie with all the fun parts taken out! The only feature that distinguishes it from a million other instantly forgotten movies exactly like it is its ridiculously dour tone and relentless focus on its standard sad cop routine, which serves to make it unusually uneventful, but not in an especially memorable way. Mostly it’s just bland and generic, and, appropriately, even features a bland and generic off-brand Native American legend. Durand searches for the generic off-brand mythic Indian “Windiga” using the generic off-brand search engine “Searchitnow.com” to go to the famous online encyclopedia “Encypdeia.org.” Pfft! I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see one! And look, there's Magnetbox and Sorny! The monster looks pretty dumb when we see it, but at least it’s a dumb CG monster. That’s something. There’s dignity in that. Spending 80 minutes looking furtively at trees for what turns out to be a knockoff Spider-Man villain is just unacceptable. And to do it with such a self-serious aversion to even the vaguest hint of fun is downright sadism. To really twist the knife, the agreeably moronic twist ending even offers a hint that these guys were perfectly capable of supplying some dumb entertainment all along, had they deigned to do so. As it stands, though, the title font and the last shot are the solitary glimmers of actual enjoyment in the whole thing, and the end only because it’s so corny and ridiculous. Dark was the night, indeed.

*originally Laytonsville, Maryland, according to the synopsis of the script from 2009, needling one to ponder what else had been changed since then.

Oh I should mention: Nick Damici (STAKE LAND) appears here, hopefully adding to his momentum as a horror staple independent from his work with Jim Mickle. He's just as ill-served as everyone is by this dumb screenplay, but hey, it's not like Lance Henricksen hasn't been in a few duds too. You gotta grind 'em out to become an icon, and I think Damici has what it takes.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: Evil's Roots Run Deep. I don't know what that means.
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No, although supposedly in part inspired by the curious "Devils Footprints" incident in 1855, with the vaguest suggestion of the Native American "Wendigo"
• SEQUEL: None
• REMAKE: None
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: USA
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None, although Lukas Haas was kinda a big deal once upon a time, wasn't he?
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Nick Damici
• BOOBIES: None
• MULLETS: None
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: I think there's a served arm at the very beginning, in a scene which looks suspiciously tacked on, possibly by producers who watched the final cut and realized that absolutely nothing happens in the movie until the final 10 minutes.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: Yes, some sort of lizard man.
• THE UNDEAD: None
• POSSESSION: No.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: No.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: None
• VOYEURISM: Nah
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: High, but currently on netflix streaming.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Your title font should not be the best thing in your horror movie.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Night was reasonably dark, I guess. But then again, what else would it be? The title probably comes from the Blind Willie Johnson slide-blues standard Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground, but I don't know what that has to do with anything in the movie.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.