exploitation deliberation: The Hallow (2015)
The Hallow was marketed as Pan’s Labyrinth meets Straw Dogs. This made me half excited to see it: I hated Straw Dogs and Pan’s Labyrinth somehow gets less and less cool every time I watch it. My favorite parts of Pan’s Labyrinth were all the parts that included those awesome creature effects. Luckily for me, the best parts of The Howling Included Pan’s Labyrinth style special effects.
In The Hallow, a tree scientist named Adam and his dedicated wife Claire move to an old house in the middle of some old woods in Ireland. They have a newborn baby. Adam likes to do science. The villagers (and by extension, the mysterious forces in the woods) do not like that Adam does science.
I’m sure you can guess which of the two parties deal with this in a respectful way. (Hint: It’s not the mysterious creatures.) It makes sense that both parties don’t like the science Adam does, because the science he does happens to be plotting to cut down substantial sections of the old forest.
From here, The Hallow turns into a creative hybrid of a home invasion and haunted house type movie. The woodland creatures prey upon the home and simultaneously “haunt” and infect it with some pretty weird black Vegemite looking tar goo ghost stuff.
Let’s start with what I didn’t like, since it wasn’t much but pretty significant.
The movie doesn’t really do much to develop the characters or their relationships. The scientist Adam ends up being kind of a douche. I wasn’t happy when weird, Cronenberg-esqe body transformations started happening to him but I also wasn’t, like, SAD. The movie kinds of put me in a weird spot. He wasn’t enough of a dick to warrant celebration, but he wasn’t exactly a nice guy either.
And I could understand the plight of the woodland creatures: their home was gonna be destroyed. I would defend myself too.
Now on to what I did like: the creatures and the gore effects.
This movie kind of feels like someone had a really killer design concept and a huge budget to blow on practical effects, and it just so happened they needed to add a story.
This isn’t meant to insult the filmmakers, because they created some seriously kick ass monsters.
They were like cabbage patch kids meets Pan’s Labyrith meets satan.
I loved every minute of it.
The movie has flaws, but I’d check it out.
