Birth Rite (2003)

Posted on Dec 05, 2007 under Horror |

Written and directed by Devin Hamilton
Starring
- Natalie Anne Sutherland
- Danny Wolske
- Laura Nativo
- Kyle Lupo
- Larry Dirk
Produced by Keith Walley
Executive produced by Charles Band

Just as with writer/director Devin Hamilton’s previous feature for Charles Band, Bleed (2002), Birth Rite doesn’t fit the profile of a typical release from Full Moon or its successor companies. This latter movie at least has a supernatural storyline, unlike Bleed’s avoidance of anything fantastic. But it’s still a movie that doesn’t seem at all like something Charles Band would release. There’s none of the comic-bookish corniness which is the the pleasure and pain of the Full Moon catalog. And while you may think that would be a good thing, you’d be wrong. In most cases, low-budget supernatural horror without corniness is like Kool-Aid mixed up without sugar.

The prologue shows us a coven of witches meeting in someone’s converted garage, being stalked by a couple of “concerned citizens,” Hamilton and Proctor (Brave Matthews and Larry Dirk). At first, they’re content merely to watch from the windows, waiting for their vigilante friends, but the situation becomes more urgent when they see a six-year-old girl being led to the altar in the midst of the witches. They decide to storm the coven, with the result being that just about everybody gets killed except for Proctor, the girl, and a single warlock who sneaks off. Having just slaughtered the girl’s parents, and not wanting the hassle of explaining to Family Services why she’s suddenly an orphan, Proctor simply decides to take her home and raise her with his own two children.

And before we leave the prologue and get into the movie proper, we’ve already seen plenty to the weaknesses that will plague the rest of the feature. The best way to showcase them is to compare this movie to Bleed. (There’s enough overlap between the movies in cast and crew that comparisons can’t be avoided anyway.) That movie rarely depended on camera work and visual storytelling; there were characters, they did and said stuff, and the camera was there to see it. Here, we start with a poorly-choreographed and poorly-edited action scene in which four bullets kill six witches, a trick knife with a retractable blade is clearly used as a deadly weapon, and the surviving warlock hides in a spot in which he should clearly be visible to his pursuers. That’s apart from the story problems, like, Is it really easier to raise a foundling child as your own, in this day of registrations and paperwork, than drop her off on the doorstep of a state institution?

“We be Wiccan, yo.”

With that as the groundwork, then, we fastforward a dozen years. The young girl, Rachel (Natalie Sutherland), as grown into one of those eighteen-year-olds who looks a lot older than eighteen. It’s her birthday, in fact, and her older step-sister Erin (Laura Nativo, also of Bleed) gives her a necklace engraved with “18″ for her age and “12″ for the years that they’ve been sisters.

Because this is Rachel’s eighteenth birthday, she of course begins having strange visions and encounters. (What, that didn’t happen to you?) All through her school day (and hey, her English teacher is Julie Strain, who also made a “special appearance” in Bleed), she keeps catching glimpses of a handsome man in black (Danny Wolske, yes, also of Bleed) whom no one else can see. Eventually, he reveals himself to her, in a vision full of dead classmates, and tells her that he knew her real parents, and would like to meet her later that night. This does not freak Rachel out. The disappearing and reappearing man, the strange visions of her schoolmates dangling from nooses… I have to wonder what she smokes normally if none of this strikes her as noteworthy.

Despite being curiously unexcitable, Rachel also has regular sessions with the school counselor, Mr. Guilford (Ronnie Gene Blevins, and do I really need to tell you that he was also in Bleed?) in which she seems much less stable, claiming persecution by classmates and coldness by her adoptive parents. This would work better if Rachel had been shown to be a social misfit or outcast in earlier scenes, but that whole angle of characterization is never really shown to us. (Or maybe it’s just the counselor’s office that brings it out in her. It’s the only counselor’s office I’ve ever seen that was decorated with posters and original artwork from Full Moon movies.)

**“No, Lucy, I distinctly remember that it was your turn to bring the chips and guacamole.”**

To continue the sketched-in nature of the story, Rachel’s adopted father and mother (Brinke Stevens) are shown to consider Rachel a second-class citizen in their family; Rachel’s only birthday present from them is a framed picture of the family, and by the way, she needs to move her stuff out of her current bedroom and back into her old attic room tonight because her older adopted brother Alex is coming home from college for the weekend. Both Rachel and her parents treat her lesser family status as a given; it has so little impact upon their actions in the rest of the story that one wonders why bother to include it and then not explore it.

In fact, Mom and Dad are barely present for the rest of the movie. I remind you, Dad killed Rachel’s real parents, and you would expect that this revelation, coupled with the tension and inequity in their relationship, would drive Rachel’s emotions for much of the movie. But no. Even when Roman, the man in black, meets her that night and shows her a vision of the past in which her parents and the rest of the coven are killed, Rachel barely gives a thought to revenge for that night and the twelve years that followed.

Why, you ask, is Roman so concerned with Rachel? Because she is the Grand Dame, the pure offspring of a pure witch and a pure warlock, and thus hella powerful. (From the usage of “pure” here, as well as Roman’s continuous references to “mere mortals,” one almost gets the impression that writer/director Hamilton either thought that witches were a particular biological subspecies, or at least wanted us to believe that.) And just to foster Rachel’s acceptance of her identity, he gives her an amulet that once was her mother’s which has all sorts of magical powers to bend people and things to her will.

On the bright side, he avoided the seven years of bad luck.

Which is pretty much like putting a loaded gun in the hands of a compulsive twitcher. As I said, the initial impression of Rachel is that she’s fairly well-adjusted, even if the exposition of the following scenes try to backpedal on that and indicate vaguely that she really ought to be angsty inside. But suddenly, once she has the amulet, Rachel becomes a complete sociopath, killing classmates, school personnel, and anyone else she wants to. We’re not talking about a progression into evil here, a seduction by dark forces that turns her to their side; she’s just suddenly willing to kill those around her without a moment’s regret.

Only thing is, despite all of Roman’s semi-mystical blatherings, he never explains clearly some important things, like why Rachel should remain “pure,” or even what “pure” means in this context. Rachel only discovers that after she decides that adopted brother Alex (Kyle Lupo) should be the one to finally take her virginity (again, any buried lust she had felt for him was so well buried that we never see a hint of it until she accidentally walks in on him). Only then does Roman spell out that sex with a “mere mortal” is pretty clearly impure, and will impinge upon the exercise of her powers until she kills Alex in ritual.

I’ve belleyached plenty about the story (and I could do more, believe me), but I know that a movie is more than the script. Which means I get to point out the problems with the other aspects of production.

A high school campus… with a slide?

Acting: Aside from Rachel’s inconsistent portrayal (and that’s as attributable to the script and some shoddy direction as to Natalie Sutherland), the most egregious problem lies with Dany Wolske as Roman. I had no problem with Wolske in Bleed; he played his part with a certain vanilla charm that seemed perfect for the role. Here, though, he looks great — diabolical, almost — but that impression is destroyed every time he opens his mouth. There isn’t nearly enough gravitas for the last nigh-immortal warlock who can pull all sorts of magical stunts with supreme confidence. He’s also trying to be the hunk-muffin that Rachel can immediately fall in love with, and thus blinks slowly and seductively with every sentence, as if he were channeling Ricky Nelson. And just to make sure he looks ridiculous, somebody decided he should snap his fingers every time he disappears or reappears (didn’t you know warlocks could do that?), giving the impression that Roman studied at the Bewitched School of Sorcery.

Among the other performers, Brinke Stevens is wasted as the phlegmatic adopted mother, and Larry Dirk plays the adopted father as if every workday ended with a two-martini chaser. Laura Nativo as Erin is vivacious and animated, but her character’s too thin to show us whether she’s got real acting chops. (She’s sincerely bubbly enough that, with the right projects, she could be the new, nudity-free Jacqueline Lovell.)

But acting, editing, staging aside, a project like this really stands or falls on the script and the director’s vision for interpreting the script — and since the same man both wrote and directed, there’s really nowhere else for the buck to be passed for the simple clunkiness of the narrative. With all these juicy character conflicts that could have been mined and exploited, we instead see Rachel use her powers to kill people almost at random: A classmate, a school counsellor, two bitchy students who talk bad about Rachel in the ladies’ room. Instead of exploring any transition of Rachel’s self-image, we get ponderous yet uninformative exposition dropped off by the truckful. I feel I could almost write a doctoral dissertation on “venculum” now — despite the fact that the venculum plays no important part in the story. (Google it yourself.)

“Yeah, the candles are nice, but how about a space heater next time? Or just a rug?”

Even the low-hanging fruit of story conflict is left dangling. The obvious symbolic conflict between the necklace from Erin and Mom’s magic amulet? Ignored. Any subsumed anger at Erin as the “Favored” daughter? Missing in action.

You know I’m disappointed with an atypical Full Moonoid release when I actively start wishing there WERE animate toys menacing the cast.