Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Horror Off-Season: Banshee Chapter


Banshee Chapter is a late 2013 independent horror movie with a somewhat Lovecraftian bent that just recently got a limited theatrical release.

We grabbed this from Amazon Instant because the theatrical release was only in the Hollywood area.  We start with archive footage from the disclosure of some of MKUltra, but quickly switches gears to a young investigative journalist being filmed by a friend so as to have an accurate record of his activities while tripping on a special kind of DMT, which is in some way related to secret government experiments.  He's more or less unaffected until he starts hearing a radio and begins to get increasingly paranoid and uneasy.  He continues to claim that "they" are coming and want to wear him and the cameraman, at some point he vanishes from view until bumping back into the cameraman as a ghastly black-eyed monstrous version.

And now the movie switches off of the found-footage angle and goes to an omniscient camera as we start tracking another journalist who's pursuing the story of the special DMT and the death of the first journalist, who was a classmate of hers while in college.  After an initial encounter in the desert, she gets involved with then enlists the help of a Hunter S Thomson-like figure played by Ted Levine.

The story is very close to Lovecraft's "From Beyond", however it's the DMT itself rather than any wave-generation machine that allows the other side to sense and interact with our side of reality.  It's a little confusing regarding the origin of the compound, but the twists are interesting enough.  There's a little of it that reminds me a bit of John Dies at The End, which makes sense given that JDaTE is basically Hunter S Thompson + HP Lovecraft + Poop Jokes.  Banshee Chapter is obviously much more serious, but Ted Levine's character keeps it somewhat light.

While having a lot of very nice moments of creepiness and tension, I feel like it may have been a bit rushed or at least poorly allocated.  The nice scary parts seem like they go past very quickly while less important character interactions linger, leading to an ending sprint that is crammed and maybe a bit too much of a sprint.  Sitting with some of the revelations from the climax before the actual climax would've probably made the whole thing feel a bit weightier.

That said, I really enjoyed watching it and have given some thought to renting it again, or claiming a more permanent copy.  So if a decent adaptation of "From Beyond" with colors of "Fear and Loathing" sounds interesting, check it out.

--PXA

No comments: