Red Canyon (2008)
Distributor: Chelsea Films
DVD Release Date (UK): 23 May 2011
Directed by: Giovanni Rodriguez
Starring: Christine Lakin, Tim Draxl, Katie Maguire, Norman Reedus
Review by: Keri O’Shea
As a person who watches more than their share of low budget indie horrors, I have developed certain almost Pavlovian responses to clichéd content which crops up so very, very often. On that account, if a film begins by showing me a carful of irritating twentysomethings on their way to stay in a ramshackle dwelling somewhere remote/dangerous then that script, characterisation and plot had better be decent. Well, although Red Canyon eventually manages to weave something quite bleak out of its various elements, it plain doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from all of those other films where I’m rooting for the demise of everyone on the road trip by twenty minutes in.
Things start abruptly: a guy called Devon (Tim Draxl) and his sister Regina (Christine Lakin) are seen heading into a local cave (for reasons as yet unknown). What we glean is that the cave looks to have some sort of laboratory in it, and whatever ‘party’ was held there has turned up a few dead folk. Hmm. Next thing we know, and it is hard to make out, but a guy in a gas mask attacks Devon…
The brother and sister duo evidently escape though: we then hop forward, according to a subtitle, ‘some years later’ and, with the annoying friends now in tow they’re heading back to where this trauma took place – their old home town – to make a decision on selling or inhabiting their mother’s old house. Before this stage, we run the gamut of overused horror plot devices: car trouble; people commenting on the general isolation of the area; several references to how far they all are from home – although happily I don’t recall that anyone took out their mobile phone and expressed surprise that there was ‘no signal’. Essentially though, everyone shines at establishing themselves as beneath contempt. Regina, or ‘Reggie,’ looks to be the character with whom we’re meant to empathise, but the flashbacks to the attack she suffered are just too brief and unclear to secure attention and her continued practice of hiding behind doors/cars as she listens to her brother and friends describe her as nuts seemed like a jaded plot device. Unperturbed by her plight, though, her friends seem to be participating in the world’s worst tourist video as sweeping long shots of the dramatic countryside vie for position with footage of the group exploring, biking, antagonising local pets and local people with their presence. Around this time we start getting shots of an irate, fist-clenching guy, so it looks as though at least one person would rather they weren’t around.
Regina at this point decides that the best way to deal with her partial memory of a traumatic experience is to head, alone, back to the same cave/drug den which still seems to have scary people lurking within. She’s rescued, but at what cost? One might wonder what the hell she was thinking in the first place, but at least her stupid actions have kicked off the inevitable bloodshed.
Though you have to wait a long time for it, writer/director Giovanni Rodriguez obviously has some ambitions in terms of structure here. Thing is, we also have poorly-delineated characters, inexplicable motivations and gaps in the script. The more-novel-than-expected framing device meant little to me because I never really felt the development of enough tension to keep me interested. You can be lost in a maze, but if you didn’t realise you were entering that maze then you won’t marvel at the amount of wrong turns or the work that went into laying it out, you’ll just want to get the hell out of there. These people just suck: putting aside the issue of a brother taking his traumatised, needy sister back to the place where she had her life ruined, putting aside her running shrieking to that very place once she arrives in town, ignoring the bizarre decision to subtitle one of the (perfectly understandable) townspeople, what we have here are weakly-drawn characters who can’t sustain the story. When that story winds up as an unseemly sort of rape whodunit, then you’ve lost me, and I suspect many others too. Yes, it’s bleak. It also felt like a cynical method of trying to assure shock value, but still failing because – and I know I come back to this often in my reviews – without the most basic elements of engaging writing intact, this is just another spin on a weary, overpopulated subgenre.