Some films remind you of youth and summer days draping a boom mic over your shoulders to help a friend realize a dream. Some films remind you of your early adulthood as a screenwriter and all the friends of friends and fellow coffee shop patrons who handed you printouts on three-hole-punched paper and asked for your thoughts on their big ideas. Rare is the movie that acts as a bridge to both sets of memories, but Hallowed Be Thy Name is low-budget and amateurish enough to make anyone who has led a creative life wax for lost youth.
Written and directed by Taylor Ri’chard, a veteran producer with a series of legitimate high-end credits, the script is full of the kind of logic flaws and stilted dialogue that typically embody the work of someone new to storytelling. Sometimes that can be a blessing because it can allow some unknown actor to shine by bringing believability to cliché scenarios and character arcs. Sadly this is not that cast. There’s really nowhere to pin one’s hopes in what is a very tedious 140-minute monster movie.
The story begins with a mysterious cave on the outskirts of a small Louisiana town. Local legend has it that if you bring a wish and an offering to the cave your wish will be granted. A candlelight shrine of all the offerings stands in the middle of the cave as a testament to this myth, yet none of the characters that discover the shrine seem all too bothered that someone lit a bunch of candles where they expect no one lives. They just turn off their flashlights and inspect the merchandise before the inevitable horrible thing happens.
In this case the horrible thing is the Cauchemar. Opinions vary to what he exactly is – vengeful spirit of a blacksmith or full-on demon – but he doesn’t like people in his cave, especially when they touch his stuff. This all appears to be common knowledge with the parents and grandparents of the town, but they decided to keep it from their children and teenagers. And as scary as living adjacent to a creature from the nether realm reasonably seems, Jo (Fiona McQuinn) decides to move back there with her teenaged son, Devin (Collin Shepherd), while her divorce is finalized.
Devin is a pretty straight-laced city kid but the first friends he makes are outsiders Jude (Zander Krenger) and Skylar (Alissa Shaye Hale). Jude has a crush on Devin, but Skylar is the island they both crash upon and she bullies them into following her to the cave. She has a wish to make, but violates the terms of service when she and Jude take some items from the shrine. With his collection lessened, the Cauchemar is unleashed.
You can’t go into a horror movie made at this budget level with high expectations, but minimally you should get cohesion. That doesn’t really happen here. There are about five occasions where Ri’Chard does something interesting with his camera, a dolly shot here and there that stun with their eloquence among a series of static scenes that start when characters walk into a room and only end when they walk off screen. In fact, the greatest compliment you could pay his filmmaking is that he made one, and that is no small accomplishment. There will likely be others, maybe even a sequel to this one. Here’s to hoping that Ri’Chard’s path follows the Raimi trajectory between his Evil Dead features.
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