The Pale Door features a promising premise. The setting is the Old West, where a gang of train robbers find respite in a ghost town run by a coven of honest-to-goodness, real-life witches, who were once targets of a literal witch-hunt. The potential here is enormous, as the Western and horror genres are often defined by their spare and elemental attributes, leaving the audience to respond less to the storytelling and more to the atmosphere, setting and construction of the end result. Co-writer/director Aaron B. Koontz only gets part of the equation right, and that is with the setting. Otherwise, the story ultimately devolves into formula, and the filmmaking unfortunately does not belie the clearly low budget.
It all begins swimmingly enough. A group of robbers is led by Duncan (Zachary Knighton) and his younger brother Jake (Devin Druid), followed by old-timers Lester (Stan Shaw) and Dodd (Bill Sage), a priest named Wylie (Pat Healy), wanted fugitive Truman (Noah Segan) and the lone woman of the group, Brenda (Tina Parker). During a seemingly routine train robbery, which goes relatively well otherwise, the team confiscates a chained-up treasure chest. The chest doesn’t reveal a gold rush of any sort, but it leads to Pearl (Natasha Bassett), a mysterious woman who offers them a place to stay when Duncan takes a grievous gunshot to the stomach. Faced with no other options, the group takes the bait – and it is, indeed, bait.
It turns out that Pearl is the daughter of Maria (Melora Walters), who runs a brothel and does in fact know the ways of the occult. From here on, the film becomes an almost non-stop barrage of gunfire and grotesquerie, staged with far too much simplicity by Koontz. It doesn’t help that the director and his co-screenwriters, Cameron Burns and Keith Lansdale, lose sight of their encouraging set-up. The heart of the story, which is clearly the plight of Maria and her relationship to her daughter (revealed in a flashback that would be heartbreaking, if not for the fact that it is treated as a throwaway twist), is ignored for a pair of technically competent but needlessly over-the-top action sequences.
Curiously, both set pieces are conceived to achieve the same result: the group’s defense of their own against the immediate threat of the witch coven. It’s as simple and simplistic as it seems, and because the screenwriters have long since given up on their inventive conceit, the audience has long since checked out emotionally. It becomes nearly impossible to care about the antiheroes, all of whom are types and none of whom can be easily distinguished from the others (the exception being Lester, an African American man who has known a lot of cruelty in his life), or the witches, who shed their skin to become ghouls of a familiar sort. Although it begins with a shred of humanity, The Pale Door loses its way with surprising swiftness.
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