Today we caught up with watching The Void, a horror film that we had wanted to see for quite a while. The film was set us using crowd funding and like Harbinger Down, which also was made with help of crowd funding, promised minimal CGI and proper old school Special Effects.
The film opens with a couple escaping a farmhouse, the man makes it to the woods but the woman is caught by 2 men and promptly set on fire!
A Policeman called Daniel (Aaron Poole) finds the escaped man, called James (Evan Stern) and takes him to the nearest hospital, currently run by a skeleton crew as it’s the night shift.
The crew include Daniel’s estranged wife, Alison (Kathleen Munroe); Dr. Richard Powell (Kenneth Welsh); Nurse Beverly (Stephanie Belding); Intern Kim (Ellen Wong); Maggie (Grace Munro) a pregnant girl with her grandfather Ben (James Millington) and another patient called Cliff (Matthew Kennedy)
Then the film really kicks into overdrive when Daniel finds Beverly in a kind of trance, with some of her skin removed and in the process of murdering Cliff! Daniel shoots Beverly but then has a seizure, causing him to pass out in which he starts getting strange visions.
During the time Daniel has been out, State TrooperMitchell (Art Hindle) has arrived at the hospital to collect James, having come across a bloodbath at the farmhouse we saw him escape from.
As he goes to collect James, we hear screaming and find that Beverly has turned into some sort of tentacled creature which quickly devours Mitchell. At which point, the 2 men who set fire to the woman at the start of the film, Vincent (Daniel Fathers) and his son Simon (Mik Byskov) arrive.
Amongst the carnage Powell is also killed, and those in the hospital, those that remain search for answers, as well as find themselves trapped in the hospital as white sheeted strangers have surrounded the place and we learn they are part of a cult.
We then discover the leader of this cult is Powell, who can not only defy death he has the power to transform people and he has planted something in Alison, which has made her seemingly pregnant. We learnt earlier that Alison had lost a baby so this is a shock.
Powell has promised she can have the child if Daniel is willing to die first as a triangle opens behind them, which is a pathway to the mysterious Void.
This final 3rd of the film is a blood soaked gore fest, which will bring back memories of The Thing but also Clive Barker classics such as Hellraiser and Nightbreed.
Yet the film still does feel original, it does have possibilities for a sequel, we know very little about the cult other than they follow Powell for his abilities to transform and we would be happy to re-enter the Void. We certainly will be intrigued to see what its writer/director team of Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski do next
It is a shame that these classic effects films have to be made using crowd sourcing as they can feel a lot more unique than the CGI heavy studio horror films, so if a fan of horror classics The Void is well worth seeking out.
You can find out more at The Void website here:
You can find the film at Amazon here:
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