Devil's Gate

Fallen Angel

Devil's Gate
Canada 2017
Directed by Clay Staub
Ace Entertainment FIlms

Warning: Some spoilers regarding the story set up over the first half an hour.

Devil’s Gate is a nice little entry into the horror genre and is the directorial debut of Clay Staub (who has been AD on a number of high profile Hollywood films, especially for Zack Snyder). This one is, like another film I saw a little while ago, one of those stories (and titles) which deliberately sets up expectations of where the plot is going... and then taking you somewhere slightly different. This movie hits one of my scare spots in terms of where it’s going so I was always going to have a fairly good time with this one.

The story involves main protagonist FBI Agent Daria Francis, played by Amanda Schull, who has been sent to the county of Devil’s Gate in order to help out with a case of two missing persons, the wife and son of a farmer in a remote farmhouse in the midst of the desert land (13 miles away from everywhere else). We’ve already seen, in the opening sequence, what grisly fate happens to someone who trespasses on this farmer’s land if they’re silly enough to ignore his ‘No Trespassing’ signs so audience tensions are set up fairly early. 

When Daria gets there, after a brief interview with the local, red neck sheriff (played in a nice cameo at the start and end of the movie by actor/director Jonathan Frakes of Star Trek The Next Generation fame), she hooks up with a young deputy called Colt (played by Shawn Ashmore) to question local people. She starts with the sister of the missing woman and it’s obvious that the main suspect here is the husband, Jackson Pritchard (played by Milo Ventimiglia), who didn’t even report them missing (it was the sister who did that). So, against the wishes of the sherif, Daria has Colt drive her to the Pritchard property to take the investigation forward. Pritchard is a profoundly religious man whose family have been living on the ranch for generations and the locals all know he wouldn’t do anything to his family.

When they get there, they find the property laden with traps and the wife’s car still in the garage. However, the power has gone from their phones and vehicle etc. After she arrests and cuffs Pritchard for suspected homicide, she investigates the house and finds... something in the basement, locked in a cage. Is it some kind of rural breeding science project that the husband has been working on? Yeah... nope.

So that’s when we get the big revelation that, according to Pritchard, the farm house has been watched over by ‘angels’ for over a century and that, when the angels took his wife and son a few nights ago, he realised they were ‘fallen angels’ or ‘demons’ and so he captured one of them to hold as ransom in his basement. At this point, it becomes clear that we’re not really dealing with a religious horror movie at all... but a sci-fi horror and, yeah, when the wife is returned, as played by Bridget Regan (who played 1940s Black Widow Dottie Underwood in Agent Carter, reviewed here) it basically becomes a siege movie as the four of them try to survive the attack of the ‘demons’ who are trying to get one of their number back. 

And it’s really not a bad slice of modestly budgeted horror with, frankly, some amazingly well done special effects (which seem to me to be a well realised blend of practical and CGI) and a lot of tension between the human characters. It’s incredibly well shot too... nothing too flashy in terms of the compositions but still very nice to look at. The opening shot, for instance, of a lone care driving through the desert towards camera with an absolutely gorgeous, cloud filled sky, indicates the sense of eye candy you will get throughout the film. There’s also an amazingly gruesome kill at one point and the special effects for this shot do not let it down... it’s something you might expect to see in a 1980s era Romero zombie movie but, yeah, it looks quite spectacular if you are into that kind of thing.

The actors are all fine too, with a special shout out to Amanda Schull, who plays the character with a ‘failure is not an option and I don’t have to be a nice person about it’ kind of chip on her shoulder, which the actor just runs with and then deliberately softens down as she realises that her assumptions about the situation are pretty much wrong at every level. She tries to instill calm in characters as Ventimiglia portray’s Pritchard as the angry, revenge seeking human. 

Now, if there aren’t enough twists for you in the main set up, there is another little twist coming later on in the movie. Now, I kind of saw it coming but I totally didn’t... which is a hard one to explain without giving it away but let’s just say, I saw a twist coming with one of the characters but it was a deliberate misdirection and two other characters were the ‘recipients’ of that specific reveal. And I’ll say no more about that.

The film ends fairly satisfyingly but, immediately after what was obviously supposed to be the closing shot of Schull riding a police car off out of camera the way the first car of the movie came into shot, there’s a curious epilogue involving two of the other characters. This, I would imagine, was originally intended to be on the film as a post credits scene but then I suspect the producers lost confidence in anyone knowing they would need to stick around for one. There’s a sequence at the end which certainly confirms that there’s more than enough for a bigger budgeted sequel at some point but, I dunno, I don’t think this film is on many people’s radar so I suspect that won’t happen. Which is a shame because, I have to say, Devil’s Gate is a pretty good movie and I’d certainly recommend it to lovers of horror and sci-fi, especially those who enjoy the siege scenario where a small location is threatened by a bunch of monsters. A nice surprise of a movie... it’s not perfect but it’s pretty close.

Kiss Of The Damned

A Vampire Under The Influence

Kiss Of The Damned
USA 2012
Directed by Xan Cassavetes
Disney Blu Ray Zone 2

I’ve become somewhat jaded over the last ten years or so to the vampire genre. I went on record a couple of years ago saying that, over the last decade, there have only been four really decent additions to this particular niche of horror fantasy that I know of which are worth crossing running water for and they are Let The Right One In (reviewed here), We Are The Night (reviewed here), Byzantium (reviewed here) and Only Lovers Left Alive (reviewed here). After seeing the trailer for Kiss Of The Damned, a relatively recent vampire movie written and directed by John Cassavetes’ daughter Xan, I was hoping to add another to that short list but, for all its strengths and charm, I don’t think it quite makes it but... it’s definitely got an interesting vibe to it, that’s for sure.

After some establishing shots of a lady in a white house, we see that she is a vampire and follow her first attack on... something... out in the night. This first vampire kill of the film, like the majority of them in this picture, is not particularly graphic in nature and is more composed of a kind of abstract impression of violence, rather than outright showing the fang to flesh ripping so common in modern iterations of the vampire myth. It’s actually an interesting way to do it and I might normally applaud that approach but, it has to be said, I didn’t find this nearly as effective at clarifying or conveying the raw nature of the kind of violence associated with this ‘after dark’ species and... well... something didn’t feel that right with this approach here, for some reason. Maybe it just wasn’t shocking enough in terms of the way it was edited. Who knows?

The name of the vampire in question is Djuna and she’s played here, very intriguingly, by Joséphine de La Baume. She soon hooks up with an equally astonishing actor, Milo Ventimiglia, who plays a writer named Paolo, who she meets by chance when she’s returning her videos one night at her local rental store. She tries to warn Paolo about her ‘not so available because I’m a bloodsucking vampire’ status but, after some persistence on the part of the young writer, she caves in and lets him into her place for a second time.

She does her best to practice safe sex with him and, in this case, safe sex means she’s spread eagled and chained to all corners of her four poster bed in a vision of BDSM style loveliness while the wordsmith has his way with her but, as he becomes attached to her during their sexual relations, he frees her and she bites him in her passion... vamping him up and turning her new lover into one of her own kind.  Which is nice and he fits right in with her social circles of various vampires who have been walking among us for centuries. And since he writes at home, he doesn’t even have to change his work routine too much now that he has, because of the whole allergic to sunlight thing, become a bit of a night owl.

But of course, all dramas have to have a challenging element to upset the status quo and, just like the aforementioned Jarmusch film, Only Lovers Left Alive, it comes in the shape of the main female protagonist’s bratty vampire sister, who has to come and stay with them for a week or two while a new safe haven can be found for her. That’s when the complications begin, of course, as sister Mimi (played by Roxane Mesquida) is, at best, a trouble maker and, at worst, someone who threatens the status quo of not just our two blood crossed lovers but the whole existing vampire society on the planet.

The film itself is absolutely beautiful to look at, I have to say. The shots are filled with bright colours and the director chooses different palettes for different scenes and, coupled with some clean compositions, things look a zillion bucks. I know everybody has been getting tired of blue and teal and the various variations of that colour combination over the last 25 or so years in Hollywoodland but there are some truly great orange versus blue set ups here which really play against each other to make those colours pop.

The compositions are, as I said, very clean and tidy in their design, demonstrating a meticulousness almost bordering on obsession and it makes for some nice moments of linear beauty throughout the film. For example, a shot looking down a staircase might have made Hitchcock proud. There’s a beautiful shot, too, of the two main protagonists making love in what appears to be a slightly blurred blue wash and we then realise we are watching them through the other side of an aquarium with the fish and their environment in sharp focus against the two vampire lovers.

Everybody looks really good too and it’s like we've been invited to a party where all the ‘beautiful people’ are attending. Some of the dialogue is quite interesting, exploring the politics of the vampire world and the cocktail conversations about just who got here first on this planet... humans or vampires... are kinda interesting.

However, the film has some minus points too. By about the half way mark it kind of goes downhill a little and... well maybe I’m being too demanding but it just didn’t seem to be exploring too many new territories, instead allowing the natural path of the ‘story’ take over in a less interesting way than the carefully observed details of the world building had made their mark in the earlier scenes. Also, the score is mixed a little too loudly in some places and obscures the ability to easily hear certain information, it seemed to me.

All that being said, however, Kiss Of The Damned is still a nice little vampire movie and while it’s not one of the absolute best in recent memory, it’s still standing head and fangs above the majority of those made in the last ten years and I really loved what looked like an homage to Jean Rollin in terms of the typography on the end credits. So, not exactly the best vampire movie I’ve seen but certainly something I would recommend to enthusiasts of the genre if they are running on empty to get their next fix. I think the director has a lot of promise and I look forward to seeing more of her movies at some point.