The Endless (2017)

Reason to watch a movie #8 - being about to attend a movie festival featuring the work of someone you admire and realising that you STILL haven't caught up on their last feature. That's what led me to finally watching The Endless (after a rewatch of Resolution, a film which has only gone up in my estimation since my first viewing of it). I'd heard this has connections to the earlier film. It has. Strong connections. I am glad I rewatched that one before I put this one on, and advise others to do the same, if enough time has passed for you to forget the details of Resolution.

Once again co-directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, and once again written by Benson, this also stars the two men in the main roles, playing brothers imaginatively named Aaron and Justin (I think you can guess who plays who). Justin is the older brother, and he's the one who pulled Aaron safely out of what is best described as a strange death cult. After they receive a video about the current state of the cult, Justin thinks it may do them good to return to visit the cult, to show Aaron what he escaped and to draw a line in the sand. But it turns out that returning just allows the men to see with adult eyes things that they found a lot easier to accept as youngsters. It also places them in close proximity to areas where time seems to run very oddly, to put it mildly.

More sci-fi and fantasy than outright horror, The Endless continues the winning streak from Benson and Moorhead that has them delivering quality content for adults without resorting to the usual bag of tricks we see in so many other horror movies. They consistently deliver thoughtful and relatable moments that just happen to take place in an environment that also contains elements of the supernatural and monstrous. Resolution was about friendship, Spring was about love (and grief), and The Endless is about the bond between siblings, the protective role of the older brother, and those timey wimey shenanigans.

I'm not going to say that I was able to keep track of this throughout, it's a slippery bugger, sometimes seeming more interested in providing interesting moments to mess with your mind than giving you a puzzle that fits together smoothly and completely, but enough markers are dotted throughout the script to keep things intriguing as we move through a plot that becomes more and more urgent on the way to a grand finale that you just know could prove heartbreaking and deadly.

When it comes to the acting, the two film-makers don't do a bad job. They have a good chemistry in their lead roles, and the writing helps them to feel realistically like brothers. Tate Ellington is excellent as Hal, the sorta-nominated leader of the cult, Callie Hernandez and Kira Powell are both decent as Anna and Lizzy, with the latter clueing viewers in to the initial links to Resolution, and both Shane Brady and Lew Temple look slightly suspicious for almost every moment they are onscreen, while James Jordan plays someone understandable angry as he remains aware of the strange time trickery going on in the area.

Nicely constructed, both in terms of the main storyline and how things dovetail nicely with the events we already saw in Resolution, The Endless may well be the best yet from Benson and Moorhead. I'll need to give it a rewatch soon, but it's a film I will enjoy revisiting. Much like every other film they've worked on together to give us so far.

8/10

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Shudder Saturday: Belzebuth (2017)

Belzebuth may be quite a mixed bag, and it ambitiously aims for something always just out of its reach, but there are scenes within it that rank among the most disturbing I have seen in some time. Because, for the most part, the victims are often innocent children. Children, some as young as newborn babies (in one sequence near the very start that has a woman lock herself in a hospital nursery room and then pull out a knife). It's easy to see why the film cannot maintain those high standards of terror in between the major set-pieces, but it's a shame that it fumbles with the other main ideas it has at the heart of it.

Joaquín Cosio plays Emmanuel Ritter, a cop who is still shattered from the above incident that took place soon after the birth of his child. He's further affected by a number of major incidents (a school pupil who guns down many of his fellow pupils, an attacker who takes aim at a swimming pool full of youngsters) as the authorities tell him he has to co-operate with a paranormal expert, Ivan Franco (Tate Ellington). This leads to them trying to keep a mother and child safe, learning more about the motivation of the killers, and eventually going on a journey with a tattooed and determined priest, Vasillo Canetti (Tobin Bell), who has already had a fateful encounter with these evil forces before.

The opening act of Belzebuth is the equivalent of a slap in the face. It grabs your attention, no doubt, and holds it, even while things start to fray as you head towards the halfway point. Director Emilio Portes, who co-wrote the screenplay with Luis Carlos Fuentes, knows just how much to show and how much to keep out of frame. When it comes to the horrible infanticide, we see splashes of blood, we see stains that cover the surfaces surrounding the site of a massacre, or violent acts that are cut away from at just the right moment. Adults, on the other hand, we can handle seeing violence inflicted upon them, and we often do get to see it. Portes has a good eye, and a good instinct for how to maximise the effectiveness of each scene without going too far.

Unfortunately, he doesn't have the same instinct when it comes to the writing. This is a messy script, with the film clocking in at just under two hours when it would have made a perfect 90-minute thrill ride. It's not something that people may say often, but both Portes and Fuentes would have done well to try and meld their material/ideas with the more streamlined Hollywood horror outings, figuring out how to cut out a lot of the extraneous content and build everything more effectively towards a knuckle-whitening finale. As it is, Belzebuth peaks at about the halfway point (a sequence in which the characters talk to a demon contained within a statue is an imaginative high point, a real mix of oddness and entertainment) and then just becomes a waiting game for viewers until the end credits roll.

There are other cast members involved, particularly the mother and child being kept safe, but this largely feels like a three-hander between the male leads. Ellington is the weakest of the three. He's not bad, he's just not given anything to make his character truly stand out. Cosio, on the other hand, is always giving the impression of his inner pain and turmoil while he dives further into this strange case, helped by his imposing figure. He may not be any kind of giant of a man, but he feels that way in many of his scenes. And then you have Bell, a lot of fun in a role that allows him to do his enigmatic schtick while also revealing more of the true nature of his character in the third act.

Despite it being front-loaded and a bit too muddled in places, Belzebuth is well worth your time, especially if you're after a horror movie that uses a number of familiar elements and tropes in ways that make them feel slightly different. It's just a shame that it cannot maintain the momentum it gathers during that amazing first act.

6/10

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