★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
A Gory Throwback to 1980’s Cosmic Horror
When I saw the trailer for The Void (2017), my heart fluttered a little. It looked like a throwback to the old Stuart Gordon straight-to-video gory goop-fests like From Beyond or Re-Animator. The upside and the promise made it look like it could rival The Evil Dead, Prince of Darkness, or my touchstone favorite, The Thing. It looked scary as hell. The movie features practical monstrous effects overlaid on top of a Lovecraftian cult and even includes a Gate to Hell. It had all the trappings of something I would really enjoy.
The story begins with a rural sheriff’s deputy Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole), on patrol who picks up a badly wounded junkie on the side of the road. He brings him to the nearby hospital, currently manned by a skeleton crew and a few patients in attendance. Daniel believes that Allison (Kathleen Munroe), his ex-wife, is still working at the hospital and can help. Rather quickly, several events escalate the situation. One of the nurses goes lunatic and kills a recuperating patient with a scalpel. Daniel shoots the crazed nurse, leaving the entire hospital contingent shocked. Then an armed father and son duo (Daniel Fathers and Mik Byskov) arrive to take out the junkie. They have been pursuing the wounded man, claiming that he has done terrible things.
Sherrif Mitchell (Art Hindle) shows up, leading to a violent showdown with the father-son tandem. Unseen by anyone, the nurse is not dead yet, having transformed into some demonic creature. It attacks the unsuspecting sheriff, impaling him with her tentacles. Shotguns blare and the nurse-demon is dead, but it has become a jump scare jamboree! To make matters worse, a group of cultists shows up with creepy triangular cutouts in their hoods. There is no escaping the hospital, and danger is inside and outside the hospital.
The plot devolves into both a visual and narrative mess at this point. To be fair, it is an enjoyable mess, but the story is hampered by a plot construction that should have been fairly straightforward. Unfortunately, instead, it ends up meandering like the maze of this hospital. There are betrayals, possessions, and garbled backstory issues. In concert with these quickly shifting storylines, the action unfurls at a breakneck pace that leaves the audience dazed by the chaos on the screen.
The Void is closer to the straight-to-video category than I had hoped it would be. It does have some of what it promised. On the plus side, the gore is beautifully crafted, and it is full of monstrously transformed creatures. Violence and action rage throughout the production. Consequently, this creates an environment that makes it hard to understand what you just saw. I think a strong comparison in tone and feel could be made to Hellraiser, with all the demons and flaying and screaming down corridors that happen in both films.
With a bit more exposition and some tighter editing, this could have been something special. The cast sold out in their performances… though I’m not sure I would call the acting great. I would have liked some humor in this film. Some horror films, like The Witch or A Dark Song, take a somber tone that doesn’t ask for humor. Splattery movies, however, can always use a little humor to take off the edge and cut the tension. If the director had blended a little levity could have made this film like Re-Animator and made it a bit more enjoyable. This is a grim grindhouse film, down to how it was shot and promoted, and I can certainly appreciate it for what it is. The Void is certainly worth seeing and worth following what the newcomer Director, Jeremy Gillespie, does next.
The Void (2017) is unrated and would push the upper limits of the Rated R category for the violence and gory content. Plus, foul language. As a result, this movie is unsuitable for younger viewers, and only daring teenagers dare watch this.
