Rating: D
Dir: Quinn Armstrong
Star: Jordan Myers, Maya Jeyam, Tony White, MaryCharles Miller
This is the third in a trilogy of separate but connected horror movies directed by Quinn: for example, the same cabin shows up in all of them. Based on my reaction here, however, I will not be seeking out either The Exorcism of Saint Patrick or Wolves Against the World. For it has been a very long time since I’ve seen such a yawning gulf between concept and execution. I went into this not really knowing much about it. When the end credits rolled – for about the third time, and roughly 77 minutes later – I realized I still largely had no clue. It feels like Armstrong the writer couriered the script to Armstrong the director, without anyone getting a chance to point out how little sense it made.
Things unfold in a cabin where Mandy (Myers), Jamie (Jeyam) and their friends are relaxing, having recently graduated from high-school, amid the usual mix of sexual tension and aspirations for the future. Things take a weird turn when the cabin is attacked by a disfigured survivor from an accident at a nearby steel mill, who dies with suspicious ease. Then Mandy stumbles across a selection of pages from a film script, referencing herself and her pals. This clues them in to the apparent realization that they are characters in a horror movie, but the death of the killer has thrown their reality badly off the rails. Death will not be cheated, especially when it comes to teen spam in a cabin.
It’s a very nice idea. Unfortunately, it’s one completely undone by terrible execution. Nothing here makes sense, from the moment Mandy finds the script scattered on the ground. Why is it there? So the film can happen! If there are rules to any of what happens subsequently, they must only have been known to Armstrong the writer, and not divulged to Armstrong the director. Because the audience certainly does not have a fucking clue. So you get a series of mediocre horror set-pieces which provide no information, until the last ten minutes. At which point it feels like even Armstrong the director gave up, inserting himself in a cameo giving instruction to the character of Mandy. Or maybe the actress playing Mandy?
I might have been able to give a damn, had everyone not been obnoxious stereotypes, whose every line grated on my nerves like an industrial strength cheese-grater. I admit, that might well have been a deliberate choice, given the film within a film scenario. It did not make it any more pleasant to endure. Subsequent events are thoroughly lacking in internal logic, such as the presence of a typewriter in the cabin, on which Mandy can try to type her way out of the predicament in which they have been placed. I haven’t seen such a machine outside an antique shop in forty years, and there’s no meaningful indication this is supposed to be a period piece: a repeated, shitty pop song does not count. Mandy has no more success scripting herself out of a corner than Armstrong the writer.