GoreGoyles: First Cut (2003)

Posted on Oct 06, 2004 under Horror |

Produced and directed by Augustine Arredondo, Kevin Lindenmuth and Alexandre Michaud
Written by Augustine Arredondo, Kevin Lindenmuth, Stephen C. Sweard and Alexandre Michaud
Starring
- Robert Harvick
- Nathan King
- Sebastian Croteau
- Brendan McNamara
- Matt Busch
Executive produced by Alexandre Michaud

What do you do with short films — either real shorts, like half an hour, or those just barely beneath feature length, like just under an hour?

Throw ‘em together and call ‘em an anthology!

It looks like Goregoyles: First Cut might be meant as the inaugural volume of a series of compilation features from Brain Damage Films, the company that specializes in shot-in-video horror and goth flicks. Im happy (oh, so happy) to report that neither of the two short films presented here is goth. And I’m even happier to say that one of them, at least, is pretty passable entertainment for the budget.

But first, our Rob Zombie-wanna-be horror host Uncle Dodo (Sebastian Croteau) helps with that cohesion thing, spending enough time on screen motormouthing and stalling that the director of these framing segments (Alexandre Michaud) rated an equal credit with the filmmakers behind the two short films.

“I hope you enjoy the spooky candlelight. It goes with my coal-powered DVD player!”

The first flick in our double feature is “The Holy Terror,” written and directed by Augustine Arredondo, who may or may not be Catholic himself, but who definitely has a chip on his shoulder toward the Catholic Church. Practically the first thing we hear is supporting character Charlie (Brendan McNamara) denouncing the Church as “those cannibals” who never really helped anybody. I don’t know what religious persuasion his friend Glenn (Robert Harvick) is; but since this conversation takes place while Glenn is bleeding from his eyes, I don’t suppose he’s feeling up to a debate on the finer points of doctrinal merit. The bleeding started with a full-blown possession episode while the two were packing up the home of Glenn’s recently deceased grandmother, and now Charlie is driving Glenn to the only person he thinks he can help: Hector (Chris Mortimore), a bargain-basement occultist. (Seriously. His sanctum sanctorum is a wood-paneled basement.)

Hector is confident that he can help rid Glenn of the demon within him (named “Orphiel” in Glenn’s earlier possessed ravings), and has Glenn lie down in the center of the pentacle in the middle of the rec room carpet. Unfortunately, the simple ritual doesn’t go exactly as advertised; instead of giving up the demon, Glenn grabs Hector’s girlfriend, hauls her across his lap, and rips out her guts while roaring like Zuul.

The transition to the next scene is kind of jarring, since we next see Glenn in a confessional, trying not to sound like a raving lunatic to the priest (Jacques Freydont). (He’s clean-faced, too. Makes you wonder exactly what you do and say after you’ve just gutted your local spellcaster’s main squeeze — “Sorry about the carpet?”) The priest gets very prickly very quickly, despite the fact that this is probably the most reasonable-sounding claim of possession he’s heard this week. Gee, someone has the affrontery to approach a church based on the life of an itinerant exorcist and ask for help with an exorcism? The very nerve! The priest waits until Glenn leaves, then makes a hurried cellphone call…

Next thing you know, Glenn is walking despondently through the park when a cleancut man in a white shirt and tie attacks him with a knife. (Your first impression may be that it’s a Mormon missionary, but remember, they usually travel in pairs.) He’s then saved by a mysterious man in black (Miles Beardsley Banwell), more from the “Johnny Cash” mold than the “Will Smith” one. This mystery man also helpfully throws several pieces of information at Glenn:

Not happy clown. Sad clown.

For two thousand years, the Catholic Church has never managed to exorcise a single demon.
The Church has an official assassin “hush force,” that liquidates anyone coming to them with a credible claim of possession, just so that people won’t know how slack they are.
Oh, and Glenn’s pretty much the Messiah to the mystery man’s religion, so long as he keeps Orphiel inside him and learns to control its power.

So, we now have Glenn trying to keep away from cadres of Catholic assassins (who may not be that great at exorcisms, but you think they’d be a little better at whackjobs with two millennia to practice). Fortunately, the Orphiel cultists aren’t dangerous to Glenn personally, but they have a nasty habit of killing anyone who might give him a clue as to how to get the demon out of him before it takes over completely.

It’s not high art, but the tale does hold a viewer’s interest; adequate acting, good pacing, some well-conceived visuals peeking through the budgetary restrictions, and appropriate use of music (unlike the blundering death metal used for the main opening credits) add up to an interesting and at least partially satisfying short feature. And no one can resist a good conspiracy, right? (And lest I forget to mention the gore, spurting blood and rubbery entrails abound.)

Of course, in hindsight, it makes little sense, and makes even less as more exposition comes down the pike about how Glenn got this demon inside him in the first place (and even worse, the requisite technicality by which he should be able to banish it). It ends on an indeterminate note, probably intended to bea mildly shocking little twist, that doesn’t pretend to resolve Glenn’s main story problems. (I mean, his problem that is the main crux of the story, not “If Bill left his house at 10am going north at 40 mph…”)

But at least Arredondo didn’t try to pad things out the extra ten minutes that would put it over the minimum acceptable running time for a standalone feature. Nothing saps horror more than obvious padding.

**“Oh, yeah? Well, last time I went fishing, I caught a fish that was this big!”**

That story was the good one of the two. The second, “Berserkers,” can only mitigate its clear inferiority with two factors: A) it has zombies, and B) at least it’s a lot shorter.

A mom and her two kids are driving through the (cheap to film in) woods when the car breaks down. Mom gets out to look under the hood, while the kids help her demonstrate that poor staging can sink a scene more quickly than anything except bad acting, which gives the staging a quality-null run for its money. Being warned not to wander off while Mom stares at the engine ineffectually, John and Jane (and I apologize, but the credits don’t tell me who played whom) promptly march resolutely down the dirt road, then run and tramp through the woods.

When Jane trips over the bones of a dessicated corpse among undergrowth, the kids really start to ramp up their anti-acting abilities. Seriously, child actors are normally bad to begin with, but dosing them up on Ritalin isn’t the way to improve their performance. “Hey. A skull. Huh. How ’bout that.” At least, when the kids get back to the vehicle and John shows his mother the souvenir skull he brought back, Mom proves to us that they come by it honestly by reacting with the same level of annoyed consternation most parents would show at, say, a child bringing back a lizard or unusually large beetle. (There’s not even a vibe of, “Don’t play with that skull covered with the remains of rotting flesh, you don’t know where it’s been!”)

Mom follows them back to the boneheap, whereupon our threesome finally manages to notch up their emotive intensity for a zombie attack. They all run via different paths to a nearby house, which unfortunately the zombies already occupy; Jane gets bitten, and immediately turns on her mother for a little intergenerational cannibalism.

Fast-forward twelve years. (No, we don’t get to fast-forward the movie itself; that’s still going.) We’re still in the woods, and we’re still concerned with one of the same characters: John, now grown up and sporting the buzzcut and camo jacket that just screams “antisocial survivalist nut.” The scenario is all spelled out for us, thanks to some exposition-heavy dialogue:

If you thought Hagar was horrible before…

Once there was a Viking who made it to Michigan a thousand years ago.
Vikings are mammals. Vikings fight ALL the time. The purpose of the Viking is to flip out and kill people.
He and his comrades made a bloody nuisance of themselves among the Indians.
The Indians killed them all, and cursed this one Viking especially.
Twelve years ago, a meteor landed near the Viking’s grave, reviving him. The Viking then brought about a general rise of the living dead.
There are people living beneath protective domes, which are starting to fall to the zombie assault. Aside from them, there are just a few survival types living out in the woods.

Of the information above, we get to see some footage of a bloody-axed Viking getting shot by arrows. No Indians, no domed cities. (Come on, this movie didn’t even have the budget to show us a paved road.) This is all ostensibly related for the benefit of Debbie and Vickie, who have ventured out into the wilderness beyond the domes without any weapons or discernable survival instinct for no real reason. (Debbie is the brunette whose acting doesn’t make you hit yourself in the forehead with a shoe to avoid full sensory deprivation. Vickie is the blonde whose acting, well…) They also had a friend, Steve, who came with them, but unbeknownst to them, John has already arranged for Steve to be et by the dead because, hey, living the life of a rugged survivalist can make you awfully lonely. Especially for blondes.

Actually, John’s been chummy with the zombie Viking for the last dozen years, too, and ol’ hornhead’s a bit, um, horny himself. Which is why we get the implication of zombie Viking rape (thankfully just the implication), and then, um…. The end.

I supposed I could spin a single positive out of this short: You know when you’ve got a cheap movie in which the sole good actor makes all the other bad actors look even worse? Nobody falls into that trap here, I can tell you.

“I feast on the flesh of the living… in my brand-new turtleneck from The Gap!”

Rather than being a story that needed to be told, “Berserkers” is more an excuse to show off a backstory which writer/director Kevin Lindenmuth must have thought was really really cool, even though he didn’t have the budget to actually show any of it to us. The constant forested backdrop, the cheap zombies (could you not find any clothes that DIDN’T look fresh off the rack?), the comatose acting, and the general lack of narrative direction make it pretty much a waste of even the limited resources that were brought to bear on its production.

Most disconcerting about that is that Lindenmuth has been making microbudget features on video for a dozen years now; he’s something of a legend in genre indy filmmaking circles. The fact that, with that kind of experience under his belt, he still couldn’t see his way clear to actually telling a story with his film is almost inexpressibly sad.