Unclean & Unseen! – THE VOID (2017)

Sometimes a nutzo, damn-the-torpedoes approach can serve a film well.

The kitchen sink. A bag of chips. The whole nine yards. There are so many ways to imply someone has gone extra lengths to push the envelope and achieve fine results. 

In 2017, I saw only two genre films brazenly cross that proverbial line in the cinematic sand. The first was Julia Ducournau’s vegetarian takedown, RAW; the other was that slimy, tentacled throwback from Canada, THE VOID. 

Leveraging a meager, crowdfunded budget for their practical effects, directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski painfully cobbled the film together in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario as a loving tribute to horror flicks of yesteryear. Nods to Carpenter, Lovecraft, Barker, and other scare masters litter the landscape where white-cloaked cultists move in on a closing medical facility. The bigger problem for the local yokels trapped inside is that there’s something even worse waiting for them in the basement. 

There can be a perverse thrill in watching a film throw caution to the wind and go five miles farther down Batshit Boulevard than you were expecting. Like MANDY, TERRIFIER 2, or, hell, even THE BANANA SPLITS MOVIE, THE VOID may not please everyone, but it earns its keep simply for trying to smash through the genre’s glass ceiling. 

It doesn’t make a lick of sense, and to say the filmmakers overextend themselves is a bit of an understatement, but if you pit THE VOID against most any other low-budget horror offering from the 2010s, you’ll find, pound for pound, it punches above its class all the way to its bitter, Fulci-inspired end. And what an ending it is. Without spoiling it, I’ll just say it’s second only to Karyn Kusama’s final shot in THE INVITATION for achieving the awe-inspiring, feel-bad ending of its era. 

Directors Gillespie and Kostanski have since gone on to contribute to the LEPRECHAUN and V/H/S franchises, but if it’s cheap, retro thrills you crave, THE VOID picks up right where Vestron Video left off. 

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