• Directed by “Martin Tate” (David DeCoteau)
• Written by Benjamin Carr
• Starring
  • Jason Faunt
  • Marissa Tait
  • Eric W. Edwards
  • Tyler Anderson
  • Sacha Spencer
  • Alicia Lagano
• Produced by Kirk Edward Hansen
• Executive produced by Charles Band

One of the plotting problems with haunted house movies and their ilk is how to keep the complement of characters/victims on the premises. After all, there are few good reasons any of us would acknowledge for staying in a locale where horrific death seems guaranteed. It’s even more of a problem with lower-budgeted movies, as budget demands keeping the cast in a contained shooting location. (Which is one of the reasons that haunted house movies, or other “spooky old house” variations, have been a favorite with low budget filmmakers for at least seventy years.) Often, that’s the one question that intrigues me when watching a “killer locale” movie: How are the characters manipulated into sticking around until the closing credits?

Here, at least, that question is answered up front: They gotta. They can’t help themselves.

Um, yeah. First thing I think of when I see this is “Native American totem pole.”

After a credit sequence composed of footage we’ll see in context later, mostly of spooky-looking dolls and old books on shelves, we first meet twenty-something Alma (Marissa Tait) as she arrives at an abandoned stone cottage in the woods, the last of six such cleancut youngsters. All of them showed up thanks to some compulsion which tore them from their normal activities and forced them out here to wait for the others, and which now prevents them from going far from the cottage. For your edification, they are:

• Paul (Jason Faunt), the doughty young mechanic who takes the main role of explaining what they’ve all experienced for the benefit of the audience;
• Len (Eric W. Edwards), a superficial fellow who had to leave the company of a paramour to heed the summons;
• Tina (Alicia Lagano), a high school student;
• Roz (Sacha Spencer), an art student; and
• Robert (Tyler Anderson), the dark taciturn fellow in the corner.

Now that I’ve told you all of that, forget it; it doesn’t matter. The characters are all too much the same. They use similar diction (with the main variation being frequency of deployment of the F-bomb), they look like they shop at the same department store, and they all react more or less the same to their predicament: with sullen and bemused belligerence. None of the characters panic or fall to pieces; none express religious concerns or cite conspiracy theories. We’ve finally got a circumstance which would account for the ridiculously-diverse peer groups seen in most horror flicks (the jock, the dweeb, the goth, the slut, etc.), and instead what we get is a “random” assortment of young people who look like they’re not only in the same year of college, but in the same major, too.

No one told them life was gonna be this way. [clapclapclapclap]

Although there is some small hint of diversity: Robert’s a Native American. Though I didn’t realize it until some of the other characters referenced it as if it were absolutely obvious. Hmm, yes, a dark-haired, strong-nosed young man with a vague accent, dressed in clothes from The Gap’s latest circular… why, he might as well be wearing a feathered headdress and warpaint! (Especially with this movie’s Romanian shooting location, I just assumed he was a local actor included to leaven the otherwise all-American cast. Silly me.)

And now that they’re all in one place, they immediately start bickering. Because filming people talking is much less expensive than filming people actually doing anything. As with most Benjamin Carr scripts, the dialogue’s not bad, but it’s too loose — there’s just so much of it, whereas in a movie which wasn’t desperately trying to pad its running time, the screenwriter would convey as much in a quarter as many words.

“But Doctor! Will I be able to play the piano?”

As the most recent arrival, Alma is the only one who hasn’t yet experienced the invisible barrier that keeps them from leaving, so she tries to jog away. As luck would have it, she picks a direction that none of the previous five had tried, and discovers that they CAN leave the cottage in that particular direction; unfortunately, that path only leads to a spooky old cemetery, where the six of them discover an upright stone box which contains three spooky little figurines. (Unlike most of the spooky little critters in Charles Band-produced films, these are actually spooky, looking more like folk art gone wrong than the production of a low-end model studio.) It’s here that someone remarks that the three figurines in their standing stone box look kinda sorta like a totem pole, which is the source for the movie’s title.

Having seen the graveyard, they go back to the cabin (pad pad pad), where someone discovers an old family bible which may or may not have belonged to the people out in the cemetery, who may or may not have experienced a similar compulsion to come here a century ago (pad pad pad). Eventually Tina and Paul leave to have another look at the cemetery, where they discover that the names of the six of them are etched on crosses, with today’s date for their deaths. (A minor annoyance that became major: The characters keep referring to the “headstones.” They’re not. They’re simply wooden crosses. I can understand if the change was made for budgetary reasons, but could we please stop calling them headstones when they’re not headstones? And while we’re at it, could we not pan so close across the wooden slats of the crosses that we can see the Phillips screws holding them together?)

And things finally start getting spooky when Paul comes back to the cabin carrying Tina’s dead body, claiming he doesn’t know what happened. (Explain, deny, accuse, argue, pad pad pad.) And then Tina’s dead body starts twitching and speaking, possessed by the spirit of Plot-Necessary Exposition, speaking in a language which only Robert can understand for no good reason. What comes out… well, if you’ve seen many other Benjamin Carr-written movies, then you will recognize the flavor, if not the particular. Because somehow these scripts always seem to involve supernatural forces which must operate by complicated and arbitrary rules, which the hapless victims have to figure out in order to outwit.

“Remember! Rape, THEN pillage! Everyone got that?”

In this case, Dead Tina mutters at length about the ancient “Three Masters of the Dead” who are the spooky figurines, and some requirement that there be six people, three to be killed and three to do the killing, and after which all bloody hell will of course break loose. And just to prove that all this is serious, one of the spooky runts breaks through the window, looking significantly less spooky once we see the closeups of the human-style eyes that weren’t in the figurines before. (A departure for the Full Moon FX shop: Instead of hand puppets or rod puppets, these ones are largely marionettes. You can tell because, despite the strobing lightning and caffeinated editing used to disguise the relative immobility of the Masters of Death, you can clearly see the thick marionette strings.)

All of which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the rest of the movie. The remaining characters bicker, more people disappear, the Masters of Death play around the periphery (as difficult as it is to rate story points as necessary or not in a movie like this, the three eeeevil marionettes seem shoehorned into the original plot idea, as unnecessary as the subspecies creatures in their own first movie). The only surprising element in the rest of the movie — and not in a good way — is a dream Alma has, also bestowed by the Spirit of Exposition: it’s composed of old Viking and medieval warfare from some movie decades previous, with very different film grain and a mismatched aspect ratio, superimposed with a digital flame effect. And a narrator! (Love it when my dreams have those.) The transition into the dream was so abrupt that at first I thought I was seeing a bizarre DVD-authoring error.

Seriously, who gets buried in their gardening gloves?

Despite the babbling dialogue, very few pertinent points are ever explained, such as why these particular six young people were visited with the compulsion to come here, or who decided that the Masters of Death need to jump through such hoops just to get their evil on. And yet, despite the padded dialogue we do get, this feature only barely manages to limp across the one-hour mark before “stopping” rather than ending. As with so many Full Moon movies from the late ’90’s, this one seems to have its genesis in some leftover props, half of a leftover discarded script, a half-dozen young actors and actresses fresh off the bus and willing to do anything for a credit, and a shooting location that suddenly became available for a four-day weekend.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0