B-Horror Style Movie with A-Horror Gloss & Panache
Succinct Synoptic Based on LORE Publicity: Four thrill-seeking friends sign up for one of their re-occurring horror-themed camping excursions and this one is to be led by Darwin, played by Richard Brakean, an eerie wilderness type guide. Please note: They ain’t Americans, they’re British. One night around a campfire, Darwin baits the group into telling the scariest and most twisted stories they can think of.
Once the raconteuring begins, the storytellers regale tales of sinister spirits and malevolent demons and like. All eventually discover that their storytelling has grizzly, gory, horrific consequences they hadn’t anticipated. “Welcome to the Twilight Zone,” Rod Sterling might have said if he were alive. LORE filmmakers, however, in this reviewer’s imagination, would say after being asked: “Rod’s dead. Welcome to our hell on earth. There’s no escape. Let the heebie-jeebes begin in earnest.”
According to LORE publicity, there were three anthology segments directed by James Bushe, Patrick Ryder, and Greig Johnson. I counted four. I don’t know why the discrepancy or miscount or miscalculation because in the end it really doesn’t matter because audiences’ rocks will be knocked. I’m only describing two in this article … because the two I selected are more than enough for reviewing a ghoulishly witchin’ bitchin’ horror thriller whose ratings are off the charts. Sequel?
Segment 1: Shadows
I rate it A+. It’s Cringe-Wince-Squirm-Hide-Behind-the-Popcorn-Box-Quotient (CWSHBPBQ) is ferociously stellar. “A story about shadows,” says the first raconteur as she gets started at the campfire. Her Dan character, played by Andrew Potts, is frantically running for his life in a warehouse factory area from thugs whom he owes $$$. They plan to smash his joints to smithereens, cut him, oops, butcher here and there and break every bone in his body. It’s late at night and the scenes of him running are effectively harrowing, meticulously rendered.
He eventually sprints towards a specific warehouse, the kind you probably would want to avoid even in broad daylight. He makes it inside … and the storytelling rockets to an even more harrowing and nightmarish level when … out of nowhere … a demonic creature that look like a cross between the Xenomorph from ALIEN (1979) and Gill-man from THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1955) shows up uninvited, of course. Sucks blood? Eats flesh? Sucks on bone marrow? No spoilers here.
The filmmakers’ have brilliantly employed the Chicken Little-Cassandra-OMG-Gambit (CLCOG). Let me describe this cinematic writing gambit using a recent nightmare I experienced after watching this movie (I’ve watched it more than once to get a hold on it and I’m still struggling): A trove of snakes are all over a kitchen I’m fleeing from as they eat a litter of puppies. I rush into a next room screaming alarms. People ignore me. Then there are shouts that I’m insane. Some start asking questions, like, ‘Why would snakes want to eat our puppies?’ and ‘How do you know they’re snakes?’ and “Serves you right for f*cking” with Mother Nature” and so on … so forth.
I don’t wake up screaming but I wake up shooook. Back to Dan futilely trying for agonizingly long minutes to convince the thugs and the night watchman that there’s a demonic creature … and so on … and so forth. AND I STOP HERE BEFORE ACCIDENTALLY INTRODUCING SPOILERS.
Segment 4: Garth
Garth!
Cutting to the chase : Segment 4’s CWSHBPBQ is ferocious, easily earning. an A+. Garth’s a theater popcorn consessionaire 7-foot tall at least, 300 pounds at least and gives off the impression that his IQ may be way down there in the dimwit area of the human brain. He’s been bullied for most of his working days at a concession stand in a movie theater complex at a mall. His bully of a boss is short, irritating and everyone in the audience easily knows the boss is to be, eventually, fatally dispatched.
Nevertheless, anxiety in the scenes of his boss bullying, mocking and denigrating him begin to ratchet up audience tension because by now an audience has been exposed to the earlier anthology segment scenes. This, the last anthology short, is infused with a concoction of slapstick humor unusually morbid, perhaps another level of black comedy and there is gore galore but not necessarily gratuitous but ample. {Obviously, the filmmakers have been ruthlessly meticulous in making this horror.)
Three concession customers in this segment, this reviewer believes, garned palpable audience empathy, so much so that the wonderment about which one or ones might survive and might not be fatally, horrifically dispatched. {Ha! Anyone believing that should contact me about getting shares in a NYC bridge I own.}
Go See This Movie
But here’s the Catch-22 tip off when you do. This reviewer has been hit with – believe it or not – PTSD-type images and visceral pulses (delayed) that Segments #2 and #3 … uh oh … might be as cinematically potent as #1 and #2, that the implied and explicit sadomasochistic ménage à trois, bacchanalia and saturnalia scenes might not be as risqué as earlier imagined. Which is this reviewer’s way of saying LORE has to be scene several times to really get to the core of what the filmmakers did, didn’t do … and … so on and so forth. {😬 Imagine a movie that has to be seen and re-seen … to get the whole picture and intent of the filmmakers.} On the other hand, authentic film aficionados are going to sign up early for the cult film status on the horizon.
Directors: James Bushe | Patrick Michael Ryder | Greig Johnson (segments)
Writers: Patrick Michael Ryder | Christine Barber-Ryder | James Bushe | Greig Johnson
Producer: Adam Bouabda
Composer: Benjamin Symons
Cinematographer: Scott Coulter
Production Designers: Michael Coyle | John Noble
Publisher, Editor Gregg W. Morris
GWM can be contacted at gregghc@comast.net, profgreggwmorris@gmail.com