Rating: 3.5/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2018 | 1/52 | Elvira’s Movie Macabre
A toy tank and an overturned Coke bottle transition to a full-sized tank. People run, hiding their kids, as the tank crushes cars. A kid in a cowboy hat follows the massive tank tracks and finds his toy tank. He brings it to three other children, one of whom is glowing.
A group of kids play in a park, celebrating K.T.’s birthday. Her father, Ben, and his girlfriend, Nicky, call the kids over for birthday cake. Later, K.T. catches Ben and Nicky making out by the river. The rain picks up, lightning filling the sky, so they hit the road to continue their road trip through the California desert. The rain clears. As they come around a bend, the radio turns to static on all stations. Ben sees tire tracks spilling over the edge of the road, finding a car that the tank demolished, along with the remnants of human remains peeking out.
Ben races into the nearest town to report what he’s seen. The streets of Hillsboro seem mostly empty, with people observing from their windows. Ben knocks on the sheriff’s door. The sheriff drives up and holds Ben at gunpoint, asking Ben basic questions about his occupation. The townspeople pour out of their homes to celebrate, but another man chases Ben with an axe. Ben and his family climb back into the car and race away. While driving away from the town, a little girl appears out of nowhere in the middle of the road. Ben swerves to miss her and crashes his car into a telephone pole. When they get out, they don’t see the girl. K.T. is convinced they killed her. With no other options, they walk back to Hillsboro on foot.
What’s going on with the kids in Hillsboro? Who is this girl who appears and disappears at will?
The movie answers this question pretty quickly, but I’ll leave it for the viewer to learn, as those answers are probably the best part of the movie.
The movie acknowledges that it lacks the budget to execute the kills in the story, so much of it occurs just out of frame or with carefully composed edits to suggest what it can’t show. I could also see this being a deliberate choice to make the horror feel more “elevated” and not exploitative.
In that same vein, the film has a more deliberate pace, bordering on slow. When we first see Ben, Nicky, and K.T. driving, the scene is silent for almost five minutes apart from the music. It eventually works as they notice the radio cutting out, but we could use a bit more in the scene to warrant the time.
The makeup for the coven was probably more appropriate when the movie was of lower fidelity. However, with the remaster, it mostly appears as though the filmmakers were attempting to make the older characters look even older and more haggard.
The film explores witchcraft and psychic powers as tools of the devil. I don’t know if it has any thematic considerations in mind—the lack of coherence in many facets of the story suggests this. The screenwriter has stated outright that he chose the subjects only because they were popular at the time.
That said, the horror moments are pretty fun. The way the movie uses children is familiar in some places but fairly unnerving in others. The coven sets are pretty great. For all my complaints, the film makes some aesthetic choices that I quite like. The dream sequence, in particular, is quite outrageous.
** SPOILER ZONE ** The film has some nods to Rosemary’s Baby and Village of the Damned, but I think the best comparison is Get Out, but instead of black people it’s children. To orphan the children, their toys come to life and kill their families. Then, the entranced children go with the other entranced children to the coven.
I like that the doctor messes up his hair and puts on glasses to disguise himself, but no one outside of the coven knows he’s the leader, so what’s the point? It’s like Superman only dressed as Clark Kent on Mars. ** END SPOILER ZONE **