Review by Ben Bussey
I get the sneaky suspicion I may have just seen my favourite film of the year. So many of the things I have long mourned the lack of in contemporary horror are present and correct in The Demon’s Rook: awesome practical monster make-up and gore FX, eerie artificial lighting, billowing dry ice. Vintage supernatural horror seems to have been somewhat neglected in recent years, and I for one have long been hankering for something new which evokes the spirit of Universal, Hammer et al. This is absolutely the case in this mightily impressive debut from director James Sizemore (also lead actor, writer, producer, musician, sound designer and FX director – impressed yet?)
Of course, there have been no shortage of movies of late which aspired to produce something in a similar vein to the genre cinema of decades gone by, wearing their influences on their sleeves – the vast majority of which singularly failed to become more than the sum of their parts. Happily, this isn’t how The Demon’s Rook turned out at all; whilst there can be little doubt that Sizemore and company are enamoured with the horror movies of yesteryear, the film they have created is by no means a pale retread of countless predecessors. The team at Black Rider Productions have created a rich, fascinating mythology which feels fresh and unique to this movie – and in so doing they’ve given birth to a delightfully strange new world which I have no doubt horror fans everywhere will be eager to visit.
Our story begins with a cute kid named Roscoe. Aside from having a badass name and a significantly cooler hairdo than I had at his age, this little country boy has a most unusual friend; a horned, white-skinned demon named Dimwos (John Chatham, in a remarkable make-up job that’s somewhere between Tim Curry’s Darkness and Frank Langella’s Skeletor), who visits him in his bedroom at night. Naturally, the boy’s parents take this curious creature to be nothing more than the product of a healthy young imagination – but they couldn’t be more wrong, as perhaps they come to realise on the night they get sizzled to ashes in their own bed, and Dimwos lures their child away to the underworld. Many years later, Roscoe re-emerges as a thin, long-haired, mighty-bearded adult (Sizemore), and heads out to find the only family he has left – his childhood pal Eva (portrayed, touchingly, by the director’s real-life wife Ashleigh Jo Sizemore). But where in the hell has Roscoe been all this time – and what might have come out after him…?
If you’ve seen the stills, posters and/or trailer for The Demon’s Rook, you’ll know the film has one very notable weapon in its arsenal: the creature make-up. If ever there was a dying art in film these days, it has to be good old-fashioned practical monster effects, and while there can be no doubt that high-end contemporary CGI and performance capture can produce jaw-dropping results (look no further than the recent Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), surely fans can be forgiven for craving the more tactile feel of practical creations – on top which, CGI/performance capture may well be out of reach to lower-budget filmmakers. Now, The Demon’s Rook IMDb page lists its budget as an estimated $75,000 – and if so, god knows the money went to the right place. The hordes of howling hellspawn that rampage across the screen range from the impressive to the downright spectacular, and for the most part this is also true of the gore. Pickier viewers may bemoan the comparatively cheap look of the digital photography – I can’t deny I would have loved to have seen this shot on film – but, particularly given how commonplace it is for low-budget horror to be shot this way nowadays, that’s just something we’ll have to live with.
Indeed, once we get past the DV cinematography, there is a remarkable aesthetic to The Demon’s Rook which really lifts it above so much modern low-budget horror. Refreshingly, Sizemore and co-writer Akom Tidwell don’t bog proceedings down with too much dialogue or exposition, preferring to let the story unfold primarily via the visuals. Equally essential to this is the terrific soundtrack, which proves a perfect fit to the overall mood of the film: doomy without being downbeat, heightened without veering into camp. All this combined with the great sound design and the aforementioned judicious application of dry ice and brightly coloured lights means The Demon’s Rook ends up quite the sensory smorgasbord for the discerning horror aficionado.
Naturally, there may well be some minor complaints to be made, although I for one would say they’re very minor indeed. At upwards of 100 minutes, The Demon’s Rook may be just a smidgen overlong for a low-budget creature feature, and it may get slightly repetitive with its abundance of secondary characters who are introduced intermittently only to be slaughtered moments later. The film’s brief venture into sexploitation territory may also have been a little misjudged; sure, gratuitous female nudity is hardly unexpected in a film of this nature, but the circumstances under which it occurs here may prove a turn-off to more politically sensitive viewers. That said, were anyone to deem it ‘offensive,’ I’d have to ponder what they were doing watching a movie in which fiends from hell roam the land slashing throats, tearing off faces and ripping out intestines left right and centre.
If I have any other quibbles it would be the slightly underwhelming conclusion, and that (unless I missed something) the meaning of the title is never made particularly clear; seems to suggest a piece of relative value in some kind of diabolical chess game…? But, once again, these are minor quibbles indeed. Overall, The Demon’s Rook is an inspiration, demonstrating the kind of heights that first-time indie filmmakers can hit, singling out James Sizemore as a director to watch in the future, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s life yet in traditional spook-a-blast horror movies.
Tribeca Films release The Demon’s Rook to VOD and iTunes on September 30th.