The Horror Show
The Damned
by Victor Garcia
Trailers can be very, very misleading. We’ve all watched a trailer in anticipation of a great release. And we have all been duped by a trailer as well. I watched the trailer of “The Damned” (previously known as Gallow’s Hill) and was very intrigued. A creepy inn, a girl locked in a basement, demons, mayhem. What could go wrong? Well, in this case, the answer to that question is: Everything.
This movie started off great. A man stands up against an old wooden door, a feral creature bangs and claws from within, screaming to be set free. The man’s internal monologue serves as our narration and the look of desperation on his face is no less than intense. Cut to a scene of a woman lying in a hospital bed on life support; suddenly there’s blood everywhere and the woman is up out of the bed and screaming at the man. The man from the opening scene, who is David, our main character, wakes up from his nightmare and the movie really begins.
Sounds good so far, right? I thought so too. Until you meet Jill, Gina, and Ramon. You initially think that this news reporter, camera man, and American girl are just friends, but then you find out that Gina is Jill’s aunt (even though they look to be the same exact age) and Ramon is Jill’s boyfriend. David, our main character, is with his fiancé Lauren, and they are in Colombia for the sole purpose of getting David’s daughter (who just so happens to be Jill) and bringing her back to America for their wedding. It’s revealed quickly that David’s former wife, Marcela, was the woman in the hospital bed and Jill is not too keen on going to the wedding. Fast forward through some forced dialogue in the form of a family style argument and we find our happy crew of 5 traveling in a van down an old country road. It’s storming pretty badly and a cop pulls them over, warning them of flash flooding.
I know what you’re thinking and you’re right…they absolutely do not take the cop’s advice. A flash flood does indeed occur and their van ends up getting caught in it, rolling over a few times. The group makes it out of the crash alive and discover a creepy old house that was once upon a time a hotel called “Gallow’s Hill.” An old man by the name of Felipe does not want to open the door for our weary travelers but against his better judgment, lets them in and tells them to wait out the storm there. He tells them not to wander around the house and he seems very nervous. So of course, Jill and her boyfriend Ramon go exploring the house for a bathroom and hear crying from the basement. Felipe has locked a little girl down there, and they are dead set on rescuing her. When Ana Maria, the young girl who’d been locked away for who knows how long, is released, all hell breaks loose and David must fight to protect his family from evil.
So I’ll say this. Was the movie terrible? Yes. The story was decent but there was too much wrong with the film itself that I couldn’t get past all the awful dialogue and bad acting. The Spanish language parts were much more tolerable than the English dialogue because I didn’t feel like I was listening to people reading lines in their first audition ever. That’s what the whole movie sounded like, every time someone spoke (with the exception of Peter Facinelli who was actually decent) it sounded as if they were reading lines for the first time. The actors had no chemistry whatsoever and you really felt like these people were all strangers. Not a family. Not a boyfriend and girlfriend. Not an engaged couple. A bunch of strangers pretending to care about one another while an evil spirit tries to kill them.
I’d also like to point out that not a single person in this movie knew what a pentagram was. Not a one. I find that very hard to believe, especially in Latin America, where there is a strong belief in brujeria. So with that being said, I don’t know if the writer intended on making his characters all look like a bunch of clueless morons, but I mean, come on, it’s 2014. How do you not know one of the most prevalent symbols in the world?
In addition to the clueless characters and the bad acting, there were plot holes galore and no real deep or meaningful explanation for anything that happened in the movie. The “spirit” knows all your deepest, darkest secrets, and when she exposes David’s horrible secret to his daughter Jill, Jill has a mini tantrum and storms off, only to never ask her father to elaborate further on the matter and simply burying the hatchet as if it were no big deal, even though the movie wants you to feel like “Oh snap! David’s in trouble!” No. The movie repeatedly makes you NOT care about anything that’s happening to these people.
But wait, there’s more…
Remember earlier when I said that Gina and Jill looked like they were the same age? Well the same goes for David and Jill. The ‘father and daughter’ look like they are only 3 to 5 years apart in age. Seriously? They couldn’t find an older man to play David? Scratch that, because the only decent (and I used the word decent, not good) acting in the movie came from David, who was played by Peter Facinelli. So they should have made Jill’s character younger and cast a much younger woman because Jill’s character was just plain awful. She was a blank slate with the emotional range of a tree. I think Nathalia Ramos was only cast for the part because they needed a pretty girl who spoke Spanish and looked like a white girl.
The movie relied heavily on “jump scares” that weren’t even cued up properly with the cheesy music! For example, a scene where Lauren is searching for Ana Maria in the house, the music blares about 3 seconds before Lauren even gets to the mirror where she sees Ana eerily standing behind her. I mean, what the hell…they couldn’t even get the music and the “jump scare” to time up correctly? It was more confusing than anything else.
So should you watch this movie? No. Go watch a good movie about possession like The Conjuring. I’m extremely disappointed in this IFC Midnight film. I truly had some high expectations with this one and was really let down.
Stevie Kopas, HMS
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