Jeremy Gillespie and Steve Kostanski’s monsters look more disgusting than scary
John Carpenter’s legacy is still affecting many horror filmmakers. Jeremy Gillespie and Steve Kostanski are for sure two of them and The Void is a questionable attempt to show their admiration for him.
The good news is that the two Canadian screenwriters-directors demonstrate an ability in creating an effective premise. During a night shift, police officer Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) discovers a badly beaten man in the woods: he rushes him to the closest hospital where only a small staff is working. The medical personnel includes Dr. Richard Powell (Kenneth Welsh), Daniel’s wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe) and a young trainee named Kim (Ellen Wong).
The building is in the process of closing down and moving to another place, due to a fire which damaged a large part of the structure. As the staff assists the man, Daniel notices that cult-like figures, dressed in hooded robes marked with black triangles, have just surrounded the hospital.
It takes a few minutes to understand that, inside the building, something worse is happening: Daniel is forced to shoot a nurse, after surprising her in the act of killing a patient. The woman turns into a gigantic monster that attacks humans… and she’s only the first of an army.
When D Films released the trailer for The Void, it looked really interesting: the idea of the cult itself is intriguing and we’re not given enough clues of what’s going on.
But our first impressions gradually change: Jeremy Gillespie and Steve Kostanski did a good job in creating atmosphere and special effects, but the plot is quite messy. It takes a while to understand the connection between the hooded figures and the monsters and, once the secret is revealed, the magic is gone.
The morphing creatures are a tribute to Carpenter’s The Thing, but if in 1982 they made sense on the big screen, all we see now is giant squid-like monsters who deprive the triangle cult followers of their “allure”.
Everything looks more violent than scary, that’s why The Void will attract the gore-fest audience, but not those horror fans who like to “jump on their seats”. The two directors show potential in delivering the visual experience, but we wanted them to dig deeper in the backstory. While we’re waiting for more terrifying results, let’s keep an eye on them.
The Void hit Italian theaters on Thursday.
