By Keri O’Shea
When you get press releases that proudly proclaim the presence of a soap star in a film’s cast, it gets you thinking about how ubiquitous soap operas are, still – especially if you don’t watch any of the soaps, ever. For instance, total strangers, when unsure how to make conversation, will usually ask you if you’ve seen some sort of lowest common denominator television the night before – with soaps being permanently high on this list. Personally I could fucking do without this heavy-on-the-shouting pond guignol, but millions disagree; hence, it’s considered such a selling-point that an Emmerdale actress gets a mention in the promotional materials before genre movie star Jason ‘Jay’ Mewes – as is the case with this year’s British horror-ish offering, The Devil’s Tower. That’s not just me taking airs and graces, either; I genuinely think this is a bloody odd state of affairs.
The Devil’s Tower is, itself, bloody odd though, so in many ways the decisions made about how to promote the film are borne out in the product. There have been a few examples of high-rise horror in recent years; some of these have been superb, some have been middling, and now we have a film which wants to do a lot, yet fails on virtually every level (heh).
We get our introduction to Albion Court with a hot couple running to the roof of the tower block (?) for ‘a bit of the other’ – just before they get consumed by an unwitting bloodlust, which leads them to off each other in a more permanent way. We then meet Sarah (Roxanne Pallett), an unhappy young woman who has been placed in emergency housing in Albion Court. Sarah’s forced to realise, in the mere five-minute walk to the obligingly graffiti-heavy lift to her new awful abode, that every generic social housing problem is represented therein – tramps, yoofs, dealers, the lot. It’s almost like they’d lined up to greet her.
Still, any port in a storm, eh? Sarah moves in – for a place which is represented as full of the scum of the earth, no one seems to ever bother locking any doors – meets the neighbours, and then confusedly stars in a crude sex comedy for a bit, albeit in the background. Next we see her family feud with her mother/muvva in all its glory; she makes friends with her would-be squatter Sid (Mewes) and eventually, after they flail around and try to work out what is so weird about the tower block, the Evil Presence which pops up from time to time makes itself better known. Essentially, Devil’s Tower remembers it’s a horror film at the last hurdle and adds some zombies, before a half-baked exposition hints at a sad story of social neglect (natch) before it’s all over.
This is a soap opera episode with add-ons. Add-ons, which aren’t compatible with the format (and I am not fooled for a second by the meta-toss spoken in the film about events in the tower themselves being ‘performance’ and so on, which are possibly intended to add a layer of depth to proceedings here). It’s such a bizarre, unworkable mish-mash; the tone is all over the place. It’s certainly skewed in favour of standard soap fare though, with a family estranged, some mention of a bereavement (albeit never really explored) and a young woman down on her luck – with all the shrill, confrontational scenes you’d expect in abundance. But then, it remembers it may need to add some flesh, segueing into ‘Go on my son!’ sex scenes which would be worthy of Danny Dyer himself; finally, it rocks out some horror elements, though this really is more of an occasional overlay. The odd still of the Crypt Keeper’s brother (sorry, sister?) and a final defeatist zombie outbreak does not a horror movie make, not really. Nor do the attempts at surrealism which appear in places. Perhaps the press release’s confidence that it has “enough scares, gore and sexiness to delight genre fans” is a tad misplaced.
On top of all of this, the film’s other puzzlers simply add to the mystifying overall effect. Firstly, Jason Mewes, a man who has had his fair share of troubles, shown confusedly walking around a British block of flats where he’s essentially playing Jay again (complete with cap turned backwards) is disorientating and – dare I say it – a little sad. I know that the guy has returned to work in recent years, but this really does feel like he’s underselling himself. Other odd touches come from the script; for instance, it seems determined to establish that the character Sarah is young and vulnerable. She’s by turns referred to as ‘a kid’, told she looks ‘about twelve’ and ‘too young to live on your own’ yet she is clearly far older than that. What is this, Beverly Hills 90210? The actress is well into her thirties! It’s not a film which can afford to sacrifice any credibility, so why not just cast a bloody teenager in a teenager’s role? Even the soaps have some teenagers, I’m sure of it. They could have cast one of them.
A bewildering, piecemeal film, Devil’s Tower might perhaps be diverting for Emmerdale fans gone rogue, but for everyone else, I’d say there’s little of merit here.
Devil’s Tower on DVD and Blu-ray is released by Monster Pictures on September 15th 2014.