Tag Archives: Deborah Ann Woll

Shudder Premiere

Waning and Waxing

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The Cycle

by Hope Madden

Seven years ago, ThanksKilling director Jordan Downey crafted the nearly wordless folk horror The Head Hunter. The medieval fantasy relies on framing, sound design, set design, creature design, and one brooding central performance to compel rap attention and generate real dread.

The filmmaker’s new Shudder original The Cycle flexes many of the same team muscles for a police procedural turned creature feature.

Downey’s film follows Meg (Deborah Ann Woll), a forensic scientist called in to help a coastal town police force with a new crime scene. Two victims, both mainly eaten, obvious animal attack. One additional body on the scene, long dead. Meg’s dad.

What the police, including chief Marks (Jeffrey Donovan), can’t figure out is why his body is there and why the maggots haven’t had their fill of him yet.

The emotional core of the film is the conflict within Meg, who ceased thinking about her father decades ago, when he abandoned her and her mother. Instead, she focused on what she could see, study, and figure out. That happened to be corpses. The conflict comes first from having to grapple with the human reality of her father, and then something else decidedly unscientific.

Woll is up to the task, and Jordan bathes her investigation in the cool blues of a Fincher investigation. The cast around her supports without overshadowing, allowing the lead performance quiet power.

But where Fincher’s forensic investigator would be working against the clock to stop a serial killer, Meg’s case is more related to a calendar than a clock, and the killer requires a lot more prosthetics than any of the monsters Fincher unveiled.

Downey’s no stranger here, although the creature work in The Cycle isn’t always on point. Cinematographer (and co-writer) Kevin Stewart relies often on shaky cam to keep the FX hidden, but there are a handful of very impressive monster moments.

The film goes on for too long, and while Downey has found a new entry point to an old mythology, he asks viewers to make a couple too many big leaps in logic. More attention paid to the mythology, streamlining the rest would have resulted in a more satisfying scary movie. But for Spooky Season devotees looking for some throwback cinema, The Cycle fits the bill.

New In Theaters, Slider

Familiar Pattern

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Escape Room

by Hope Madden

Man, I really liked Escape Room back in 1997 when it was called Cube.

Director Adam Robitel, who managed to do something fresh and upsetting with his 2014 feature directorial debut The Taking of Deborah Logan, here contents himself with borrowing … lifting…no, this is downright larceny.

In Vincenzo Natali’s underfunded but groundbreaking Canadian horror, Cube, six strangers—each with unique skills and backgrounds—find themselves trapped in a building and must unravel each room’s puzzle only to escape to the next room/deathtrap.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the trailer for Escape Room, but Robitel and screenwriters Maria Melnik and Bragi F. Schut have certainly seen Cube.

Cripplingly shy brainiac Zoey (Taylor Russell) is one of a handful of random strangers to receive a puzzle box in the shape of a cube. Let’s just assume that’s a nod toward the film’s source material and not a different, terrible rip off of Hellraiser.

By solving the puzzle, Zoey—and, sprinkled all over town, others—win the opportunity to attempt the most elaborate escape room ever constructed.

Actually, the architecture is weirdly familiar.

If you can get past the plagiarism and lazy theft–please add Final Destination and Saw to the list of the aggrieved—you will note that Russell and the entire cast performs quite well. Deborah Ann Woll (True Blood) impresses as a bit of a badass, while Nik Dodani endears in a small role and Tyler (Tucker and Dale vs Evil) Labine is adorable, as is almost always the case.

Many of the set pieces are pretty cool, too. One upside-down billiards room bit, in particular, holds your attention. But the game cast and sometimes fun sequences can only overcome the film’s weaknesses for so long.

Even if all these antics are new to you, the film’s predictable climax and disappointing waning moments are bound to leave you feeling that this movie could have been better.

It was once.