Dark Walker (2003)

Posted on Sep 15, 2004 under Horror |

Directed by Danny Draven
Written by Dan Jacobs
Starring
- Mike Sage
- Kathleen Taylor
- Rick Irvin
Produced by Chuck Williams

09/29/04 Note: When I originally posted this review, I was under the impression that the budget had been about $125,000, and I thought the movie looked good for the pricetag. (No, I don’t remember where I ran across that figure.) Director Danny Draven has since set me straight: The actual budget was $15,000. FIFTEEN THOUSAND MEASLY DOLLARS. I am in awe with what this man can do with a pittance, and once again I pray that he’ll someday be given a grown-up budget to play with. -Nathan

The story starts with a flashback to 1878 on the homestead of one Farmer Hobb, who does the unforgiveable: He steals a pumpkin! That’s right, he goes into the woods at night with his scythe and snatches a pumpkin from a patch growing in a secluded spot, ignoring the ominously-lettered sign: TAKE NOT OF THIS EARTH. (Then what damned fool planted pumpkins there in the first place?) He takes it back to his porch and cuts into it, only to be greeted by a gush of blood. Then a hideous ragged creature (that’s the Darkwalker, played by producer Chuck Williams) appears, grabs the farmer’s scythe, and ends our flashback.

Pumpkinhead 3? Oh, goodie!

In the present-day California town of Sanger (real place), landowners Robert and Nancy McGee are sinking their money into Hobb’s Grove, a haunted house attraction built on the site of the infamous murders. (Hobb’s Grove is a real and elaborate haunted house, and shooting the movie there added a whole extra dimension to the production values.) Gearing up for their first season, they hire the last of their tour guides and exhibit extras, a group of high school students who will form our requisite band of correctly diverse protagonists/fodder:

Josh (Mik Sage), the good boy, whose family has known the McGees for a long time;
BJ (Rick Irvin), also in Draven’s Cryptz), the token African-American;
Reef, the quintessential stoner;
Stephanie, who’s pretty much a generic girl without any novelty factor (hey, not everybody needs to be a “character”);
Carrion, the over-the-top Goth chick;
Rhonda, the over-the-top rich bitch; and
Maggie (Kathleen Taylor), the shy new girl in town who immediately clicks with Josh; all she needs is a “FINAL GIRL” T-shirt. (If she seems familiar, it’s because Taylor also starred in Director’s Cut, last week’s review, in which she was also designated Final Girl.)

(Apologies for the lack of some cast names; this is what happens when you return the DVD to the video store before you realize how paltry the IMDb information is.)

Comments on the characters right off the bat: Rhonda hits the “rich bitch” vibe perfectly right off the bat with a single facial expression, which makes it a shame that she is then viciously overplayed. Every damned sentence out of her mouth hammers on the “my rich daddy/you buncha peasants” refrain in a manner that’s really, really unnecessary. Good thing she won’t be around to annoy us much. (Whoops, gave that away, didn’t I?) And Carrion is annoyingly, self-consciously pretentious — but I guess that may be authentic after all, since I find all Goths annoyingly, self-consciously pretentious anyway.

“Now, the first order of business is not staring at Maggie’s touque.”

Maggie, by the way, has a psychic thing going; when she shakes McGee’s hand, she gets a quick flash of fragmentary images of people screaming, blood, and a dimly-seen creature.

Meanwhile, beneath the “coming soon” signs, a monstrous hand bursts out of the sod in the night…

Their first night on the job, the kids are taken on a flashlight tour through the haunted house. This gives Draven a chance to repeat one of the effective visual techniques from Hell Asylum that draws in the strengths of digital video: Handheld POV shots lit only by the flashlights. Rhonda, of course, gets instantly fed up having to rub shoulders with these riffraff commoners, and quits ten minutes into her first night on the job. But she gets lost backtracking by herself through the haunted house, and ends up alone surrounded by bloody props. Well, not entirely alone, because she turns a wrong corner and ends up on the receiving end of the Dark Walker’s scythe.

Having been awakened by desecration of the land or something (”How DARE they stoop to capitalism on my hallowed earth!”), the Dark Walker shows great skill, common among slasher flick villains, in choosing victims that don’t prematurely bring the plot to a halt. His next target for the night is the foreman of the crew that’s clearing trees for the parking lot, taking the man’s own chainsaw and slaughtering him with it at his trailer. (That skill of chainsaw use must also be inborn in slasher villains, as a monster who made his last appearance in 1878 can scarcely be expected to know the intricacies of operating modern power tools.)

“This here puts me in mind of my mother-in-law. But then, everything puts me in mind of my mother-in-law.”

While seemingly inconsequential, the foreman’s death does have the definite benefit of introducing us to one of the absolute gems of the movie: The sheriff, a huge brawny side of beef with a salt-and-pepper flattop and shoulders the size of medicine balls. He’s got that southern twang that all county-elected law officers have to have no matter what region they’re from, and his dialogue is a perfectly sincere amalgam of every tobacco-chewing sheriff who ever used words beyond his level of education. Willing to assume that the foreman’s gory death was an accident (having seen all manner of unlikely demises due to blue-collar inebriation), he agrees not to delay the big opening night of Hobb’s Grove.

Said opening night gives the Dark Walker opportunity to start whittling away further on the employees, decapitating Reef and leaving him as part of his own “voodoo witch doctor” exhibit. This worries the sheriff that they might have a serial killer on their hands, but in deference to the McGees’ pleas about this make-or-break first season, and the general community support for the attraction, he agrees to keep things low-key and add a half-dozen deputies to patrol the grounds. (Lucky for everyone that the Dark Walker is keeping his efforts concentrated on low-level flunky employees instead of the crowds of paying customers.)

“Raahr! Grrr! Boogah-boogah-boogah!”

Naturally, our remaining protagonists are starting to get spooked (though no one’s really bemoaning Rhonda’s disappearance), and after Stephanie falls prey to the Dark Walker (see what happens when you break the Buddy System?), Maggie shares the psychic flashes she’s been having. The old caretaker who wanders around the place, whose job duties mainly consist of muttering cryptic pronouncements like “Innocence may save you,” bolsters the feeling that there’s supernatural stuff going on. (Rule of thumb: Weird old men muttering fortune-cookie non sequiturs get a lot more respect when they’re not pushing shopping carts.) They start researching the original killings and find references to a hidden earth-worshipping cult among farmers of a century back that involved human sacrifice. Josh and Maggie even track down the last of the Hobbs family (descendent of one of Farmer Hobbs’ twin daughters who survived the famous attack), an old lady who comes out of her Alzheimer’s fog just long enough to make more cryptic pronouncements of doom on those who desecrate the land.

But it’s too late, because tonight’s Halloween night, and the Dark Walker’s batting cleanup, this time especially going after the McGees, whose purchase of the Hobbs land wasn’t quite as above-ground as it seemed.

The whole movie plants itself firmly in the context of previous slasher and monster movies, but is no less entertaining for that. While by the calendar the Dark Walker’s pattern of killing is problematic (why does he take so many nights off?), the pacing in terms of the movie’s running time is nigh perfect, keeping things moving with episodes of violence while slowly cluing the survivors in on their danger. There are a couple of rough edits, but largely the coverage and editing of the gorier moments keep them quick and effective and hide the lower-budget. There are a few technical quibbles — a couple of underlit scenes, and the odd shot in which the filmlooking process fails entirely to disguise the digital origin of the footage — but on the whole, projects like this prove that digital video can provide a feature film as “real” looking as the shot-on-film genre flicks of a decade or two back.

“Great. Every time I wear a white top…”

My other disappointments are largely story-related. The nature of the Dark Walker’s vendetta, and the offense against the land which prompted his vengeance, never actually do come to the fore (is he somehow now the guardian of the Hobbs family, exacting retribution for the McGees’ underhanded means of obtaining the property?). More importantly, though, there are a couple of glaring missed opportunities for the final act. I was fully expecting, and looking forward to, a reuse of the “handheld POV with flashlights” bit from the first act, this time with the final survivors running desperately through the house to get away from the Dark Walker. It’s a nice visual break from the more standard “third-party viewer” camera use, and it would lend both suspense and unity to the climax. And I can’t believe, given that most of the killings take place during Hobb’s Grove’s business hours, that there’s never a crowd scene, with dozens of willing extras running from the bloody menace of the Dark Walker. (Heck, I’d even settle for a semi-comical scene of the Dark Walker striding with murderous intent through crowds of funseekers who just think he’s part of an exhibit. Of course, to make that work, we’d really need to have a reason for the Dark Walker to choose the victims he does…)

Whatever the flaws, Danny Draven here demonstrates again that he can take a microbudget and make it look like several times its dollar value, and his skill in doing so improves steadily. As long as he’s able to keep making his movies, I’m more than happy to keep watching them.