I love going back to my B-movie horror roots, where as a young Blockbuster fiend, I rooted through their itty bitty horror section for the perfect B-movie. What makes a good B-movie in horror? Maybe it’s like how the Supreme Court talked about obscenity: I know it when I see it. No, more precisely, I think it’s my appreciation that even at an independent, low-budget level, a filmmaker is trying to do something worthwhile, and in many respects, pays homage to the horror masters before them. Yeah, the acting is B-level, but there’s often flourishes of something better to make it worth watching. All of that to say, I went back to those roots with the 2004 slasher, Malevolence, which is streaming on Peacock.
The film is produced, directed, and written by Stevan Mena. He did two sequels to this film, one of which is the 2010 prequel film, Bereavement. He had reportedly $200,000 to shoot the film across two years, which in 2004, that’s not too shabby. For context, that’s the same budget The Blair Witch Project had in 1999. So, it’s doable to do a creepy, horror film at such a budget point.
Anyhow, the film starts by telling us how many children go missing and are presumably abducted in the United States. We then see that six-year-old Martin Bristol in 1989 has been abducted and is being held captive while someone else butchers a young woman. Fast-forward to the present day of 2004, and four morons, as criminals tend to be, especially ones who rob banks, decided to rob a bank. One of them is shot and later dies. Another goes off on his own, where he then kidnaps a mother and daughter and holds up in the safe house where the robbers are all supposed to meet to split the money. The other two, girlfriend and boyfriend, eventually catch up to that house. But by that point, it’s revealed that the “house” and the nearby farmhouse, are the playground of a serial killer. He kills the first bank robber before the couple get there. The daughter who was kidnapped was able to escape and hide. When the couple gets there, they split over a rift (paranoid the other is going to turn on them), and that’s when the girlfriend is killed.
The serial killer then turns his attention to the mother and daughter and a freaky cat-and-mouse game begins. The boyfriend returns, and errs on the side of his better angels, to help them. He gets killed for his troubles, and the mother and daughter are able to escape, but not before we learn that the serial killer is the 6-year-old from 1989. In other words, he learned the ways of serial killing from the previous killer who abducted him, killed that guy, and started his own string of killings. So, he’d be 21 in the present day of the film, or the same age as Michael Myers, which of course, my brain went to Mena doing a total homage to Halloween. First, with the age, then with some of the wide shots setting the scene, the use of shadows, the killer wearing a covering that is only taken off at the end, and the mystery of whether the killer survived at the end or not.
So, because it was a homage, in my mind, to Halloween, I naturally liked it! It was a good ol’ fashion slasher flick with no fuss, no muss. Sure, the beginning is truly atrocious with the acting and set-up of the bank robbery (and the sound mixing felt off), but once all the characters got to the house and the farmhouse, and into the darkness, the film picked up and was firmly within its wheelhouse. Surprisingly, the best acting in the entire film was from Courtney Bertolone, who plays Courtney, the daughter. Well, Jay Cohen, as the adult Martin Bristol, also did a respectable job as the killer. Again, it felt very Nick Castle as the Shape in Halloween, which doesn’t bother me one bit. I prefer the slow, plodding killer, who stalks.
Give me foreboding atmosphere in a horror film, not a particularly easy feat to achieve, and you can win me over. Mena did that here. Yes, there’s some gore, but not a lot. Instead, he’s leaning mostly on the atmosphere in the shadows he built. Better yet? The film was less than 85 minutes. You can’t beat that!
For horror fans who also enjoy B-movie horror, I think they’ll get a kick out of this one.
Milam's Musings 