We are at a small carnival with some dwarfs, freaks, a small Ferris wheel that barely reaches a few meters, and a fortune teller. Something new to attract people is needed, and that fresh new sideshow is a gargoyle-like creature which they hope will be a new crowd-pleaser. The city sheriff is invited to the opening show, where the monster will be unveiled under the banner “God’s Greatest Abomination”. The town’s God-fearing pastor, however, doesn’t like this, and believes the creature is The Devil himself. And of course, the opening doesn’t go as planned when the monster tears itself from the chains, spreads its wings and flies away to get itself some victims. Who could imagine that happening. The city’s first victim is none other than the pastor’s son, and since the Winchester brothers are unavailable, he puts the law in his own hands.
And in the meantime we get a middle part where the monster is hunted in the forest by incompetent police officers, since the forest is the cheapest place to shoot horror movies, and to stretch out the paper-thin plot. Although the tone seems somewhat family friendly and at times like a longer episode of Supernatural, there are some gory scenes to behold and decent make-up effects. The monster seems to be a mix of CGI and animatronics with more screentime than I expected, while the characters are mostly pale stick-figures where you quickly end up rooting on the monster, as one usually do in a zero-brainer like this. This is, however, one of the better SyFy movies made for TV (that I’ve seen, at least) from their endless catalog of cheap monster/shark films, especially in terms of the technical aspects – and it probably works best for the younger audience.
Director: Sheldon Wilson
Country & year: Canada, 2009
Actors: Lou Diamond Phillips, A.C. Peterson, Vlasta Vrana, Dominic Cuzzocrea, Simone-Élise Girard, Dan Petronijevic
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt1397497/
Linda inherits her mother’s Victorian mansion, located in the middle of the Australian dusty farmlands. It’s been remodeled as an retirement / nursing home, run by Connie and the doctor Barton. She’s quick to settle in, but it isn’t long before nightmares begin to haunt her, while some of the old people start to die in mysterious ways. She finds her mother’s diary that reveals one dark secret after another, and opens repressed memories. She begins to see a figure in her bedroom window, the water tap turns on by itself, the house cat begins to hunt shadows in the hallways, and candles seem to light up by themselves. One of the female nude statues in the garden has had one of her tits crushed. Much of what Linda is beginning to experience is the same thing her mother noted in her diary. Linda’s underlying paranoia skyrockets to eleven as she believes someone is tapping her phone late at night while she talks to her boyfriend, Barney, the only one she can barely trust.
Dr. Maitland is collecting esoterica, and one day the guy who is his regular source of such items offers him a skull that is supposedly the remains of Marquis de Sade. He soon discovers that the skull is possessed by an evil spirit who turns people into crazed killers.
The author Kathy Keen is on a trip in Bali, Indonesia, to do some research on an ancient black magic called Leák. She has already been to Africa where she learned about Voodoo, but she needs more material to fill her book on the subject of black magic. She gets help from a guy called Hendra, who’s got some knowledge of the local folklore, and he also soon becomes her love interest. He takes her to the obscure corners of the jungle where they meet The Queen of Leák, a crazy old witch with a cackling, screaming and over-the-top animated laugh. And it is obvious that the person who dubbed her voice had a really fun time in the recording studio. Anyway, it’s already hard to describe what’s going on here, but it’s something like this: the witch orders Catherine to take off her skirt so that the witch can tattoo something on her leg, using what looks like a long lizard tongue. If this sounds bizarre, you haven’t seen nothing yet. The tattoo is supposed to be a sign that Kathy is now an official student of Leák, and must come to her every night to learn more about this mysterious magic. And it’s straight down the rabbit-hole from here on, where Kathy and the witch dances like drunk hippies, transform themselves into pythons, flying screaming fireballs, and … pigs. You just saw that coming, right? And we get other things that include a flying head which you just have to see for yourself to believe.
