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Horrorfest Day 3

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Heretofore the Horrorfest’s offerings have shown us ghosts and madmen, shying away from traditional monsters like vampires, zombies and demons. The final three entries fix that omission.

Wicked Little Things is the latest film from J.S. Cardone, a relative veteran in this group with credits going back to 1982’s The Slayer. Most recently, he’s credited as writer and producer of The Covenant. Like The Abandoned, it takes advantage of beautiful Bulgarian scenery (this time acting as the mountains of Pennsylvania) to tell a story about the dead reaching out for the living. A pre-credit prologue set 100 years ago sets up how children were used to work the mountain coal mine, and many of them died in a cave-in, so you know what to expect going in.

Karen Tunny (Lori Heuring of Mulholland Drive) is a young widow trying to put the pieces of her life back together by taking her daughters Sarah (Scout Taylor-Compton of TV’s Charmed) and Emma (Chloe Moretz of The Amityville Horror) to live in her husband’s crumbling old family homestead. They find the area infested with more than rats, spiders, and a crazy old coot played by Ben Cross. It seems that all those dead kids somehow re-animated as flesh-hungry ghouls who somehow haven’t decayed much nearly a century, and they won’t stop eating people until they wipe out the line of the greedy mine owner that doomed them. Somehow they’ve also managed to escape detection all these years, known to most of the locals as only a rural legend. Unfortunately, that list of “somehows” is a bit too long, and the viewer is left to make up the answers to all these questions. That wouldn’t matter if the menace presented was scary enough, but despite their pale pancake make-up and scenes of them munching on messy barbecue, the squad of Bulgarian tykes employed by Cadone as scampering zombies just isn’t frightening. Making things worse is an over-reliance on horror clichés, from a car that won’t start to a flashlight running low on juice to figures suddenly appearing in the road in front of cars (twice!), there’s too much that we’ve all seen before. Mania Grade: C+. (Wicked Little Things repeats on Monday.)

For a more original take on an old idea, we turn to The Hamiltons, the latest film from the team of Michell Altieri and Phil Flores, who bill themselves as the Butcher Brothers. The Hamiltons are a family of orphaned siblings with hidden homicidal tendencies, sort of like the Texas Chainsaw Sawyers with a normal face, or a bloodthirsty Party of Five. David (Samuel Child) is the eldest, keeping more than a corpse or two in the closet while trying to maintain control over the family. Twins Wendell (Joseph McKelheer) and Darlene (Mackenzie Firgens) are much more out of control and have shared more than a womb. Their indiscretions are the reason the family has to keep moving to elude the detection of their crimes. Francis (Cory Knauf) is your typical angsty teen, except that he’s tortured by trying to keep the family secret. As for Lenny – well, for most of the film Lenny is an intriguing monster in a box. The story’s main conflict is over whether Francis will spill the beans about the Hamilton’s killings in order to save Samantha (Rebekah Hoyle, who starred with Firgens in Sweet Insanity), the latest captive in the basement, before he too succumbs to the family’s secret genetic quirk.

The Butchers and Adam Weis provide a solid script that keeps viewer interest in the drama despite the thin plot, throwing in creepy details to keep one on edge, and the ending is handled with style. The film’s greatest liability is the cheap looking video quality – it’s difficult at times to tell the real movie apart from the video journal Francis is keeping as a school project. This may be intentional, but I think they may have succeeded more in juxtaposing the family’s still freshly painted, glaringly white house with the bloody murder taking place beneath it if The Hamiltons looked more like a “normal” movie than an indie art house project. Mania Grade: A-.

I don’t call The Shining “Stephen King’s The Shining” or The Curse “Wes Craven’s The Curse”, so I sure as hell am not going to refer to Hood of Horrors as “Snoop Dogg’s”, despite that being the onscreen title. When this horror anthology was dropped from a national distribution deal, the folks at After Dark picked it up for Horrorfest, and it’s obvious to see why on both counts. Hood looks much like a Troma movie, with crude humor, cruder gore of the papier mache variety, and an awkward, jittery style of direction from Stacy Title (The Last Supper).

Under the credits, animation by Japan’s Madhouse studio (which returns in between stories) tells us how a skinny hood named Devon (Dogg) accidentally shot his little sister in a gang battle, and he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for her life, becoming a Satanic agent of sorts. Thus, he appears onscreen to introduce three tales of terror, kind of like a half-baked Crypt Keeper. The first story is about a graffiti artist (Daniella Alonso) who is given a magic tattoo by creepy Danny Trejo that allows her to cause her rivals to have fatal accidents when she crosses out their tags. The second tale is about a bigoted Texas a-hole and his wife (Anson Mount of TV’s The Mountain & Brande Roderick of Starsky & Hutch) who are required by the will of his ex-Army father to move in with his old platoon for a year or forfeit his inheritance. The vets are supposed to be teaching their new live-in landlord about honor, but the guy is such a dick (and a murderer to boot) that they opt for bloody revenge instead. The third story is about a rapper (Pooch Hall of TV’s Pepper Dennis) who promises God he’ll live a righteous life in exchange for success, but instead betrays his partner for greater fame.

Familiar faces pop up throughout, including Method Man, Billy Dee Williams, Ernie Hudson, Lin Shaye, Jason Alexander and Dallas Page, but there’s no disguising the miniscule budget and general sloppy attitude. It’s merely a time-killing mess, but it’ll probably make a lot of money on home video due to the Snoop Dogg name. Mania Grade: C. (All three of today’s features repeat on Monday at most theaters.)

As the last two days of Horrorfest repeat screenings from the first three, this ends my report. I think it was a worthy experiment that gave some films some deserved attention, while for others that attention was undeserved, just like any other film festival. Rumors are circulating that some of the more popular titles may get a wide release of their own, but we can be fairly certain that the whole lot will come out on DVD early next year.