★★
“Cursed or worse.”
Blair (Brauns) gets out of prison, after a year inside for drug offenses, and is shocked to find her boyfriend (Caraccioli) has married Yvonne (Cameron), who has become the step-mother of her young child. Worse follows, for visitation is contingent on Blair finding and maintaining regular employment – not easy given her rap sheet. Her boyfriend’s new wife, very kindly, points her in the direction of a job as a tour guide at a local cavern. So far, this sounds more like some kind of Lifetime TVM – and not even the good Lifetime TVM – to the point I was wondering why I had this one on my ‘to-do’ list.
Ah, here we go. For, it turns out, the cave system is home to a witch who has been infected with a curse. Blair has become the patsy who is going to take the curse off. And it’s a particularly nasty curse, which basically turns her into a magnet for evil creatures of all kinds, from zombies to vampires. If she’s going to see her daughter again, “maintaining regular employment” has just become a relatively minor problem. I love this idea. It’s like a more feisty and action-oriented version of Night of the Demon [the fifties movie, rather than the eighties one], with the concept of a curse which cannot be dispelled, it has to be passed on to someone else to get rid of it. The concept of Blair having to figure out how to do that, while simultaneously fending off a selection-pack of night creatures, is one with great potential.
Unfortunately, it’s not what we get, at all. To begin with, there’s the ending [spoilers follow]… Well, it doesn’t have one. There’s absolutely no sense of closure. Blair is still cursed, little or no closer to finding a solution, and separated from her kids. I’ve grown used to this kind of thing in books, where you’re given the first volume free, then left dangling to try and get you to buy future volumes. It doesn’t work there, and here, the movie doesn’t even have the grace to inject a cliff-hanger ending into things. It just… finishes, lying there like last night’s empty beer-cans. [spoilers end] Nor is there any escalation: you’d expect things to ramp up, towards a battle against a particularly Big Bad. Nope.
On the positive side, the monsters are surprisingly well-realized for the budget, with some particularly effective mask work. And despite a strange accent, Brauns (from Sweden, reaching Los Angeles via England, New Zealand & Australia – which explains the accent far better than the movie does!) is a decent heroine, driven by her strong maternal love. There is some good camerawork, not least a sequence in which Blair has to battle her way across some heathland, through a small army of zombies. However, neither this, nor even a cameo from horror icon Bannister (star of the Phantasm franchise), can come close to countering the thoroughly underwhelming effort, put into what’s little more than half a story, and missing any final climax entirely.
Dir: Rene Perez
Star: Karin Brauns, Cody Renee Cameron, John Caraccioli, Reggie Bannister