Today being Christmas, surely I could have posted a review for some Christmas-themed movie. Well, I usually write these in advance by a day or two, plus I generally only set up one a day, so these generally come out in the order I see things. So, here’s my review for a Canadian horror movie starring a bunch of not-particularly-huge actors with some vaguely familiar faces (many appear in various Canadian-filmed TV shows, and one actress had a supporting role in the Scott Pilgrim movie).
Well, it does involve talk of a savior and a very unusual birth, but that’s pushing it for Christmas analogies. This isn’t Die Hard after all.
After a father and son murder a woman, a man who got away injured is found by local cop Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole). He realizes he has to take the man to the local hospital, a largely deserted place after a fire. The only people there are two nurses, an intern, an older doctor, a pregnant teenager, the girl’s grandfather, and one other patient. Dan doesn’t really want to go there because his estranged wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe) is one of the nurses, but things go very weird not long after he gets there. The other nurse kills the male patient and removes her own face, the father-and-son arrive to kill the man Dan brought in, and some weirdos in white robes with triangles hiding their faces have the place surrounded. Anyone who tries to leave is attacked by the cult, all of whom seem to be armed with knives. Also, some people in the hospital don’t seem to stay dead, or human for that matter.
This was a creepy flick, the kind where answers aren’t really forthcoming, and the terrors are of a more cosmic/Lovecraftian nature. Who are the cultists? The movie doesn’t say. What do they believe or get out of all this? They don’t even talk, and we never see what any of them look like below the robes. The father and son might know some things, but even they don’t seem to know anything, believing only that the cult is bad and they need to take out as many of them as they can. Dan is a decent man, and when a state trooper who shows up doesn’t last very long, he’ll have to step up and do something with whatever knowledge he can get.
There is a theme running through all this of life, death, and rebirth. Dan and Allison’s estrangement was caused by the death of their child, and the older doctor can relate to that after the loss of his own daughter. The father and son are doing this largely because the cult killed the father’s wife (and, of course, the son’s mother). The son also adds to the general concept of unexplained phenomena due to the fact the last cultist he showed mercy to slit the son’s vocal cords, leaving him unable to talk. This is a movie where corpses in the morgue might start walking again, man-sized monsters cry like human babies, and the hospital suddenly develops new lower levels. It does make a bit of sense, and it owes more than a little bit to John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness.
That sense of familiarity might be a problem for some. This isn’t the most original movie, but what it tries to do, it does rather well.
Grade: B
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