Vault, The (2000)

Posted on Jun 27, 2001 under Horror |

Directed by James Black
Written by Douglas Snauffer and Carl Washington, Jr.
Starring
- Michael Cory Davis
- Shani Pride
- Ted Lyde
- Leopoldo Papi
Produced by J.R. Bookwalter and Chuck Williams
Executive produced by Charles Band and Mel Johnson, Jr.

Now, let’s start things off by making something clear. I’m white. Very, very white.

I’m not referring to my skin color, which is more of a pale ruddy color (spent about fifty bucks at a tanning salon last summer and had very little to show for it — I had to show under my waistband to prove that I had previously been even paler). No, I’m culturally very Euro. I grew up in rural Maritime Canada, where everyone’s of British descent; I don’t think I even saw a black person in the flesh until I was ten or twelve. And even when I stumbled into the American mainstream, I never got into what the powers-that-be have thrust upon us as “black pop culture.” I’ve always hated rap and hip-hop, and I don’t think there’s been very much that deserves the label of “soul” for probably twenty years. (Lest you think I’m some racist bastard, you should also know that I hate country music too, that whitest of white genres. I’m an equal-opportunity curmudgeon.) And you will never catch me using the word “urban” as a synonym for “inner-city African-American culture.”

Predictably, this movie was blamed for a string of copycat high school vandalism against lathe and plaster.

All of which is a roundabout way of telling you that I was very leery about putting this screener in my VCR, since to all indications it was simply the standard Full Moon low-budget “buncha kids trapped somewhere with something nasty” cassette-filler, except — wait, ready for the exciting gimmick? — everyone’s black! I was especially cynical knowing that, on several notable previous Afro-aimed Full Moon outings, the makers had still been the same bunch of White Boys: Ragdoll was directed by Ted Nicolaou, and Charles Band himself directed Blooddolls. Well, that last misgiving could be assuaged by the face that James Black (last seen around these parts co-starring in HorrorVision) was making his directorial debut. But still…

Our opening setpiece features a young black punk breaking into an abandoned high school at night with that inexplicable desire to scrawl nonsense on walls with spraypaint and call it an accomplishment. He’s met in his exploits by a scrawny old security guard (Leoparldo Papi) who tells him in no uncertain terms that it’s not a safe place to be. But then the kid hears some kind of thumping in the basement, and when he turns back, the guard is gone. So he ventures downstairs to where the thumping is coming from behind an exposed section of lathe and plaster; knocking it away, he discovers an old locked door, shaking with the pounding. The guard shows up again, trying to warn him off, but the kid’s determined to rescue whoever’s back there — so the guard beats his brains out with an iron bar. Roll credits.

Right. Now for our real characters, who are four high school students and their teacher, Mr. B (Ted Lyde). Even if you know nothing about the movie, you should feel right at home here, because the students are exactly who you’d expect: The cheerleader Desaray (Shani Pride), the athlete Willy (Austin Priester), the rebel Kyle (Michael Cory Davis), and the nerd Zachary/”Zipper” (Kyle Walker). Yup, all we need is Ally Sheedy’s character and we’d be looking at the African-American remake of The Breakfast Club. They’re making a trip to Washington High School, which is scheduled for demolition inside of a month. Why? Well, because, as hard as it may be to believe, this high school was once (over a century ago) a slave processing center for recent arrivals from Africa. (Note: This movie was actually shot in and around Tuscon, but for the sake of the story I suppose we should think of it as taking place in Florida or Georgia or something.) It’s thus had something of a notable history, and so Mr. B, who was a student there twenty years ago, thinks that something should be preserved of its history. Now, it never becomes clear what Mr. B thinks will be worth scavenging for posterity from a school that’s been cleaned out and locked up for more than five years; it seems more like an excuse to get a gang of teens into an abandoned building so that they can be menaced by…

From janitor to security guard! Who says the American dream doesn’t hold for all races?

Whoops, getting ahead of myself there. Anyway, they get inside (leaving their pseudo-Jamaican driver outside, played by director Black) and almost immediately run into the security guard who about guns them down before they identify themselves. Mr. B promises they’ll be careful and clear out soon, so the guard leaves them with some advice: Be careful, and DON’T GO IN THE BASEMENT.

Because that’s exactly what you do in these situations, our heroes split up. Which is terribly cliche, but it’s actually a relief, because we’ve watched all three male students competing to play Alpha Male with the single female, so at least we’ll be reducing some of the posturing and hormone-spawned hostility we’ve been treated to for the least ten minutes. Willy and Desiray (score!) head for one level, Kyle and Zipper for another, and Mr. B explores the main floor, and as is expected, each of them gets some time to snipe at each other (except Mr. B, of course, being alone and all), and Willy has a chance to be both a gentleman and a jerk with Desiray, and then the expected weird stuff starts happening. Desiray sees a message on a chalkboard, “RELEASE ME,” that disappears before Willy can see it; Kyle sees a hateful face superimposed on his in the mirror above the urinals (and hey, sport, how’re you expecting that thing to flush?), and Mr. B discovers that the guard was actually the janitor Spengler back in his own student days — and hasn’t aged a bit.

Eventually, because it was inevitable, Willy and Desiray make it down to the basement and discover the locked doorway. Willy, intrigued, hammers on the lock, but Desiray then goes into some kind of trance and busts through some more lathe and plaster a half-dozen feet away and discovers a key. Key, lock… Ta-dah! It’s open! And whatever’s in there, it’s out!

This guy’s been in detention a looooong time.

We’re now 35 minutes into the movie, and this seems like a good time to stop and point out a common problem with the recent Full Moon movies especially those which (like this one) clock in at 70 minutes or shorter: in a queer permutation of the three-act structure, they seem to end up with an overlong first act (this would make a perfect spot for an act break), and then a too-slow third act, with no real second act in between. It makes the movie seem both too long and too short, if you can understand that. (Imagine the sound of one hand clapping and kill the Buddha on the road. Understand now?)

Yes, kids will now begin to die, and yes, Spengler will now explain to Mr. B the sordid history behind the place. It seems that one of the later slaves brought to this place was a magician named Shazuku who used the blood of his five roommates in a ceremony designed to give him the power to overcome his captors; unfortunately, he was discovered before he could finish the ritual, and the slavers locked him in the hidden vault to starve to death. Now that he’s out, naturally, he’ll want to kill a fresh five victims and become all-powerful or somesuch. (In a queer happenstance, Zipper manages to find exactly the same story on his Palm Pilot. All together now: Huh? What’s he got loaded in there, the Junior Woodchuck Handbook?)

Well, most of the characters get killed (notably including one death involving a falling sheet of glass to the head — not an effect that was possible in the days before CGI, and very memorable), and there’s a lot of running around, with exterior doors that won’t open and tentacles that keep them from getting off the roof…

“Now let’s see… What page to I get killed on?”

If you’ve been paying close attention, then you should by now have experienced more deja vu than simply The Breakfast Club. As mentioned, we’re in an abandoned location, locked in, with nasties chasing our handful of characters; if memory serves, Full Moon’s The Dead Hate the Living was the most recent to use this formula, and the resemblances are very apparent. We’ve also got the evil spirits released from a vault, such as in Prison of the Dead, the far inferior next Full Moon release after The Dead Hate the Living. We’ve also got the whole connection between modern inner-city culture and the ghosts of slaves, such as we’ve seen in Candyman. There’s a whole impetus-slowing scene near the end where Spengler explains to each of the survivors the “evil” that drives their lives, which is really similar to the whole “defining pain” nonsense in Star Trek 5. And the ending bears more than a passing resemblance to that of the original Star Trek episode “The Alternative Factor”. It’s not that I’ve got a major vendetta against unoriginal plots — heaven knows, I’ve willingly seen enough of them — but like a junior Frankenstein’s first experiment, the pieces don’t have enough stitching between them to keep them working together well. (Whoa. Worst simile of the day, I think.) In other words, the plot simply doesn’t jell.

First and foremost: An old slave processing center is simply being destroyed? There isn’t a historic society that wants to restore it — or at least knock off the old walls and discover things underneath like the old wooden door? (This is, of course, ignoring the initial premise that said slave center became a high school in the first place.)

And then the old guard, who is of course more than he appears, but apparently less intelligent than just about anybody in similar circumstances: If it’s so important for him to keep that door locked, why did he just disappear after first meeting the protagonists, and wait for them to open the door before showing up again? I mean, how hard would it have been for him to simply plant himself in the basement to ward off any precocious teens? And who the hell decided to leave the key a couple of yards from The Vault Which Must Not Be Opened?

“I have to be the nerd AND the Odious Comic Relief? But they’re paying be double, right?”

For that matter, howcome no one in all the years of the school’s operation ever went investigating the banging noise behind the wall in the basement? Especially now that we’ve seen how well ol’ Spengler can guard it when there’s more than one person in the building.

(An unrelated bit of stupidity: Mr. B goes to all the trouble of explaining the slave history of the place, and then when Willy and Desiray find the vault with shackles on the walls — behind a door that they themselves guess to have been unopened for at least a century — they say, “Huh? What are these doing in a school?” Yeah, ‘cuz it’s been all of half an hour since Mr. B told you this was a SLAVE CENTER! Jeez, I knew high school students were stupid, but…)

And just to compound things, the dialogue is frequently repetitive, needlessly antagonistic, and far too on-the-nose, i.e., characters actually saying what they mean instead of using the normal circumlocutions we use. (How often do you hear teens admitting candidly how much they wished the teen of the opposite sex would look their way? Not too damned often, except in movies like this.)

My final complaint along these lines are about the “who survives?” issue. On one side of the equation, there are those movies in which you know who’s going to survive (the geeky virgin girl usually, and definitely not the rich bitch or the football player who kicks cripples); on the other, there are movies like this, in which the survivors are picked almost at random. It’s not that I want my plots predictable, but the survivors should be fairly discernable for two reasons: One, the characters who last longest are normally the leads, the ones in which we’ve invested the most emotionally. Two, the survivors should survive because their best suited to do so (I know that sounds terribly Darwinistic of me, but the fact remains — a character should survive at least partly because of effort and ability, not simply because that’s how the dice rolled).

After all this bitching, I will point out that the movie looks great. Using an actual abandoned school has its pluses, and there’s quite a bit of attention paid to visual composition. (Like HorrorVision, this was shot in DV and FilmLooked, and it’s even hard to tell that it’s not film.) Acting ranges from competent to quite good (with Shani Pride managing to make her character the most engaging, instead of simply the “hands-off” cheerleader she could have been).

Most gratifying is the fact that the whole slavery angle didn’t seem so much “exploited” as a necessary part of the backstory. One doesn’t have to be of African heritage to recognize the horror of slavery, and using something of that enormity simply to set up a silly story is like cavalierly depicting rape, times a billion. The use of that element here was tasteful and understated, though not used to nearly as great effect as it could have.

It may seem incredibly depressing that the current crop of Full Moon movies leave you wishing they were so much better. (Hint, Full Moon people: POLISH THE DAMNED SCRIPT FIRST.) But considering that there were a couple of years that i didn’t even want to think about the movies long enough to even imagine how they could have been improved, it’s quite an improvement. Onward and upward.