On an isolated farm in an undisclosed rural hamlet, Louise and Michael have arrived against their mother’s wishes to do what grown children do.
Their father is near death, and their mother is fraught with despair because she believes the devil wants to claim her husband’s soul.
Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) is the pragmatic one. He doesn’t flinch when his mother (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) flies into a fit at the dinner table. Louise (Marin Ireland) is the glue struggling to hold herself and her family together now that they are all back under the same roof.
Framed over the course of a week, with each successive day bringing more tragedy, “The Dark and the Wicked” is more than just Bryan Bertino’s fourth film.
Like his previous efforts, “The Strangers,” “Mockingbird,” and “The Monster”—where Bertino attacked a different genre of horror, whether home invasion, found footage or creature feature, and completely made it his own— his latest finds him turning his imagination loose on a classic template, the ghost story, while framing his narrative around the nature of true evil itself.
The result is nothing short of electrifying.
“The Dark and the Wicked,” which debuted at the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival, was our favorite film that we screened. Packed full of expertly timed jump scares, devastating revelations and some of the most emotionally bruising and horrific character deaths in recent memory, it should cement Bertino’s reputation as the predominant director working in horror today.
But it was far from the only good upcoming genre film that Creative Loafing Tampa Bay viewed.
From female protagonists fighting back in spectacular fashion to creature features that curiously failed to display a monster, this year’s entirely digital Fantasia Fest lived up to its reputation as the premiere destination for cutting-edge cinema.
We’ve already told you about “The Columnist,” the bloody good tale of a female journalist who delivers a fatal blow to her most vociferous online trolls, and “Hail to the Deadites,” a love letter by fans for fans of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell’s beloved “Evil Dead” trilogy.
Here’s our take on eight other upcoming feature films that we watched:
Minor Premise
Hands down, the second-best film we saw, “Minor Premise” is a masterful example of high-brow science-fiction done right.
Ethan (Sathya Sridharan) is a neuroscientist working in isolation to unlock human memory and map the nine quadrants of the brain where different emotions reside. Of course, he experiments on himself. And, of course, things go horribly awry.
“Minor Premise” is almost impossible to categorize. It tackles time travel in a wholly new, wonderfully abstract way. It details characters who feel and act real. And it transforms into a white-knuckle cat-and-mouse thriller as each of Ethan’s different emotional personalities take control of his body for an hour or more at a time, including an elusive, repressed personality that may be trying to sabotage his efforts for a breakthrough.
Ambitious, fearless, heartbreaking and wholly original, “Minor Premise” is destined to be near the top of many Best of 2020 critic’s lists.
Alone
Yes, I know you’ve seen a hundred survival thrillers where a mean, evil man torments a poor, unsuspecting woman, but “Alone" stands out.
Director John Hyams (“Z Nation,” “Black Summer”) and writer Mattias Olsson approach the story of Jessica (Jules Willcox), recently widowed and trying to find some respite from grieving, with surgical precision. From her earliest interactions with her unnamed assailant (Marc Menchaca), a 40-something-year-old serial killer, to the perfectly staged final showdown, “Alone” doesn’t flip the script on women-in-peril thrillers but gives the subgenre a timely reality check.
Hunted
Director/co-writer Vincent Paronnaud also attempts a fresh take on the woman-in-peril stereotype, using a campfire fairy tale to frame his life-or-death struggle between Eve (Lucie Debay), a rising female executive, who falls prey to two seemingly harmless men, The Foreman (Christian Bronchart) and The Accomplice (Ciaran O’Brien), who take her deep into the woods to rape and kill.
Whereas “Alone” rockets along, nimbly avoiding tired, expected tropes, “Hunted” aims higher by trying to connect its protagonist to nature and the energy that exists in a forest. It’s a calculated risk that mostly pays off.
For the Sake of Vicious
Five years after his pulverizing vigilante opus, “The Demolisher,” director Gabriel Carrer teams up with his former leading man, Reese Eveneshen, to co-direct “For the Sake of Vicious,” another blood-soaked odyssey into the abyss of human cruelty.
(CW: Sexual assault)
Carrer and Eveneshen keep it pulpy and simple. A nurse, Romina (Lora Burke), comes home on Halloween to find a stranger, Chris (Nick Smyth), torturing her landlord Alan (Colin Paradine), who was accused but acquitted of raping Chris’s daughter.
What follows is a frenetic onslaught of violence as a horde of masked assailants storm Romina’s home, determined to kill everyone inside. While “For the Sake of Vicious” may lack nuance and subtlety, it more than compensates with sheer chutzpah and creative nihilism.
Survival Skills
Ridiculously inventive and almost too clever for its own good, “Survival Skills” is framed as a “lost” training video from the 1980s, created to educate new officers at a nondescript community police department.
The video focuses on Jim Williams (Vayu O’Donnell), a prototypical recruit beginning his first week as a patrol officer, who responds to a series of routine calls for service that become more intense and challenging.
Ironically, the main problem with “Survival Skills” is Jim— not the actor, but the character. Writer-director Quinn Armstrong spends so much time exploiting Jim’s naiveté that he never feels like a real person, which becomes a huge issue when the film takes a decidedly dark turn in its third act.
The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw and The Block Island Sound
Call it the Robert Eggers effect.
For better and worse, both “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” and “The Block Island Sound” try mightily to recreate Eggers’ lighting-in-a-bottle approach to nuanced, psychological horror that helped him craft two of the best films in recent memory, “The Witch" and “The Lighthouse.”
“The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw,” which tells the tale of an isolated community, which has refused to embrace technology or society’s advancements for hundreds of years, that comes under siege from a suspected witch, is the better movie. “The Block Island Sound” takes minimalist horror to an extreme, showing how an isolated community deals with a barely detectable threat that drives residents mad.
Unearth
The only true dud that we saw during the festival, “Unearth” will literally have you shouting, "What the frack!" at your screen.
Environmental horror can be terrifying, see “Annihilation,” when done right, but “Unearth,” despite giving icon Adrienne Barbeau a plum role, proves a meandering affair about fracking in the rural heartland, losing itself for long stretches on farm politics and economics. Its biggest crime, though, is failing to create a central monster to embody its warning about mad-as-hell Mother Nature exacting revenge.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
