The Void (2016)

So I came home from work the other night after an exhausting nine hour shift and decided I needed to watch a horror movie before bed, because I'm masochistic like that. Someone had mentioned The Void on Facebook, maybe Caitlin Kiernan, I don't know. I have a lot of Lovecrafty friends and mention of this movie has been popping up like fat, greasy, meaty bubbles in a pot of fish stew. So I popped open Netflix, saw it was streaming and thought: "Well fuck me, it's right there and the playback is so much better now that my cable isn't being stolen anymore" so I hit play.

Holy SHIT! Hellraiser Reanimates the Evil Dead Prince Of Darkness Xtro Thing from The Beyond! Perhaps it was the late hour, possibly my own sheer exhaustion, definitely a little bit of "I haven't seen a decent horror movie in over five years" frustration, but I damn near exploded. This flick moves faster than curry diarrhea through a greased up asshole, and is almost as gross to look at. This is season 1 of True Detective, starring Skinless Uncle Frank as Herbert West, directed by John Fulci and Lucio Carpenter and filmed on location in Silent Hill, Carcosa. I was absolutely, utterly and immediately and hopelessly infatuated with this film. I wanted to be its best friend, paint its nails and stay up all night giggling with it.

I immediately gushed about it all over Facebook. If I could have carved its initials inside of a heart on an oak tree, I would have. And I found a Void Buddy in Christine Hadden, editor-in-chief at Fascination With Fear, who agreed to humor me when I asked if she would be interested in watching the film with me and discussing it via FB messenger as we did so. Here is the result:

Me: Is it weird that I find Shotgun Dad to be kinda hot?
Christine: Well, he looks a little like Donald Pleasance, but ok.
Me: Well that killed it.

Shotgun Dan is actor Daniel Fathers, who was also in Pontypool, a fact which automatically makes him cool. Shotgun Dad has no name, so I'm sticking with Shotgun Dad. He's supposed to be a Red State militia type in a cowboy hat, rootin' tootin' and shootin' his way through the crackhouse full of weirdo pervy cultists who may have killed his wife and baby daughter and gave his halfwit son a half assed tracheotomy. But when he gets really pissed off/stressed out his Midwest tough guy speak slips away, revealing a British accent. Okay, so he kinda sorta looks like Donald Pleasance a little bit. But he has way more hair and is far more badass.

Christine: Dude is relatively hot...is he not?
Me: I'm sticking with Shotgun Dad.
Christine: The cop, not the junkie, by the way. 

Not Barry Pepper & Not Lily Taylor

Aaron Poole is the "star" of this cosmic skullfuckery. The cop, not the junkie. I've never seen him before, in anything, anywhere. He's from Canada and kinda looks like Barry Pepper, the end. Oh, and the junkie looks like Peter Lorre circa The Maltese Falcon, the end.

The small cast - Shotgun Dad, Halfwit Son, Cop and Junkie arrive at the Marsh County Hospital (total Lovecraft reference) to join the rest of our cast - Cops ex-wife, Grandpaw, Pregnant Teen, Asian Intern, Some Guy, Head Nurse and Kind, Elderly Doctor. The clothing is serviceable, the colors are neutral, the hairstyles simple. Timeless is the best description. And nary a cell phone nor a laptop to be seen. This could be anytime, anywhere...although I believe Christine and I settled on Iowa, 1980s, because we could and why not?

Me: Where the hell does this take place, do you think? What state?
Christine: Probably somewhere like Ohio. No ocean to speak of...no mountains...hell, could be anywhere.
Me: Red State fer shure.
Christine: IOWA!
Me: Sounds good.

Prince of Darkness

Then suddenly and with no warning and out of freaking nowhere, the gore hits the fan with a solid, meaty slap. In rapid succession, at least three classic horror movies are thrown right into our faces:
*Session 9 - a long, silvery implement is pulled slowly out of a now deflated eyeball.
*Prince Of Darkness - a blond woman turns her face to the camera...except there is no face, just a raw and bloody ruin where her face skin used to be.
*Nightbreed - She continues to tear at her face as cop screams at her to stop, tearing the skin mask away from her skull in bloody ribbons.
Christine also claimed it smacked of The Crazies, but it's been many years since I've seen The Crazies and I forgot to ask her for specifics, so I suck.

I opine at this point that Cops Ex-Wife looks a little like Lily Taylor. Christine votes for Zelda from Pet Sematary. Christine wins. NEVER GET OUT OF BED AGAIN!

Dafuq is that?!

As a dark and rumbly storm moves in across the sky, and the plot moves into the morgue, and a mysterious force silently cuts the isolated hospital off from the rest of the world, The Autopsy Of Jane Doe comes to mind. Outside, The Strangers appear to perform their own version of Kill List. A briefly stunned Cop slips into dreamland for a few seconds and hallucinates stock footage from Hellraiser and Event Horizon. But when he wakes up, he's right smack in the fuck in the middle of The Thing, as Nurse McRipFace unleashes an unholy bellow and begins hemorrhaging tentacles out of her mouth and eye sockets. After a long, frantic, harrowing round of axe chopping and pus squirting and tentacle waving and demon screaming and Expendable Sheriff killing, Shotgun Dad and Halfwit Son - whose name turns out to be Shaun - both have red on them.

Halloween 2 gets a Suspiria color palette as we check on the Cthulhu KKK out front. Meanwhile, the cast of The Mist heads into the spider pharmacy and Cop gets a phone call from Lost Highway. While Cop talks to Simon (who lives in the weak and the wounded, Doc) about his ex-wife's fate, Shotgun Dad flips through some True Detective (season 1) Polaroids and realizes that a trip downstairs to Silent Hill to confront Dr. Satan is unavoidable. Heh, un-a-VOID-a-ble. See what I did there?

Christine: This is like Jurassic Park on the walkies.
Me: See, this is why I hate basements. Velociraptor Zombies!
Christine: This (basement) is like Silence of the Lambs - goes on for miles!
Me: And into the abortion scene from Creep. (also) Dead & Buried.
Christine: They should have called this LOOKING FOR CTHULHU.
Me: Or "Hellraising The Thing Alien From Beyond."
Christine: Definitely The Resurrected.
Me: Re-Animator!
Christine: Walking Dead right there.

Xtro

Me: The Road! (referring to basement full of zombies)
Christine: Nightbreed again.
Me: Audition! (referring to a bloody, moving sack on the floor)
Me: Headdesk zombie! (referring to gif above)
Christine: That's so awesome!
Me: Upside down zombie! Very Xtro!
Christine: GODDAMN! So creepy! I LOVE XTRO!
Christine: The Shining! (as Kim stumbles about with an axe) 

Cop ventures into the bowels of the basement and straight into the Alien Queen's egg chamber, without Ripley or a flamethrower to help him. He takes one look at what Skinless Uncle Frank has done and goes full blown Ash from The Evil Dead. The axe rises and falls, rises and falls. But unlike the first axe dispatch scene - full of ferocity and meat-thudding and inhuman screeches - this one is somberly silent, drawing away from itself in sorrow.

Prince Of Darkness

But there's no time to mourn! Cop wanders into Skinless Uncle Frank's personal chamber in Hellraiser 2, filled with sheet draped corpses. Skinless Uncle Frank has gone full blown Martyrs and is now determined to summon the Prince Of Darkness, figuring it's safe this time around because Shotgun Dad is NOT Donald Pleasance, does NOT have the axe, and therefore cannot possibly stop him.

Christine: OWA TAGU SIAM!
Me: You watch your mouth!
Christine: This is just wild...WILD

And indeed it is! Pregnant teen pulls a Polonious on Cop and kneels before the Void, ready to birth the baby, which turns out to be Skinless Uncle Frank's baby, his own resurrected dead daughter Sarah. However, it looks like the cloner in Pregnant Teen's womb scanned only the inside of Sarah's colon and part of her nostril, because what comes ripping out of Pregnant Teen's womb in a gorrific bucketslap of blood in the face looks more like Xtro up there fucked a pork roast, put a skull on its face, waited until it was half finished with its first plate of spaghetti and then rammed some rabid rhino DNA right up its ass. Baby Pork Roast is on the rampage through Freddy Krueger's boiler room, snorting and squealing and slamming skulls into bone and brainjuice with one mighty stamp of its grasshopper drumstick. More people die. Cop tries to shut the doorway. Halfwit Shaun battles the pork roast. Kim locks herself inside of a Halloween slat closet and gives herself away by loudly whimpering. The Pork Roast reenacts the Engineer chasing Kirsty down the corridor scene from Hellraiser and the final scene is an eerie matte painting by H.R. Giger for Lucio Fulci's The Beyond as seen through the eyes of the crew of the Nostromo before LV426 was even called LV426!

Me: The Thing, The Fly, Necromentia!
Christine: Silent Hill, slight bit of Pumpkinhead, and some LOTR orcs.

Yes! YASS! All of that and more! So much, so gross, so crazy skullfucking batshit cosmic insane! Exceedingly throwback! So 80s! Much clamshell! Very wow! More of this for me, please!