I finally got round to watching The Void. A cop finds a chap crawling about on the road, bloodied and incoherent and takes him to the local hospital which is in the process of closing down so only has a skeleton staff packing stuff up and looking after one young pregnant girl and her father. Two blokes who set fire to a young woman at the beginning of the film also arrive, while outside mysterious figures dressed up like the Klan add more menace.
You get scissors in eyeballs, faces peeled off and tentacle/The Thing/Cthulu type beasts doing nefarious deeds forcing our cop hero and friends deep down into the bowels of the hospital to sort this shit out.
There are nods to numerous classics along the way, Hellraiser, Event Horizon, The Thing and The Beyond immediately came to mind as I watched. It is bleak with an unsettling atmosphere and played straight, no laughs at all, which to my taste is how a horror film should be...BUT....
It just didn't grab me like it should/could have. The characters don't elicit any sympathy so you don't really care about their demise, the dialogue needed some snappy quotes along the lines of, "I'll tear your soul apart" or even, "Jesus wept" and the gore, whilst decent needed one or two really stand out moments to drop your jaw.
It garnered many plaudits along the way but I can only surmise these are from critics who have been bombarded with the insipid crap that passes for horror in the last two decades and missed out on the glorious '70's and '80's horror heydays. It's okay and a worthy effort... but won't stay in your mind too long.
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"Why did they have to go and cut her for?" "She could have been used two, maybe three more times!"
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