Fear PHarm – review

Director: Dante Yore

Release date: 2020

Contains spoilers

This really shouldn’t be anything more than a slasher flick, with a family of killers (many wearing masks) and yet it put a twist into it that put the film on my vampire radar. How so? We will get to that (it is at the end of the film but it doesn’t spoil the film by revealing the concept).

The film starts with a naked woman, covered in blood, running around a corn maze at night. She gets out of the maze and a group of masked assailants follow, led by an unmasked woman, Gemma (played younger by Jenna Burd and older by Aimee Stolte, Verotika), and facing a woman. She runs, knocks the woman down and kills her (she hits her head on something). Ultimately she is killed in turn by Gemma and a machete.

The gang at the corn maze

15-years later. Brandon (Houston Stevenson) is sexting his girlfriend Wendy (Emily Sweet), who happens to be hiding under his bed and wearing the cheerleader outfit that he really wanted her to model. They are about to get it on when his mom (Jenn Tripp) walks in and their friends, brother and sister Rustin (Chris Leary) and Melanie (Tiana Tuttle), follow in. Trying to work out what to do with their day, Wendy suggests a haunted corn maze. Rustin says no, it was the scene of satanic murder 15-years before (this leads to a wonderment as to how the family got away with murder, since apparently the police were involved?) Eventually they decide to go.

John Littlefield as Herschell

The film is self-aware. There is a comment about not having exposition on the journey, for instance and the maze insists on mobile phones being handed in before entry. They get to the maze and a mark put on when paying and scanned on maze entry sets a scanner off for one of them. This indicates that one of them is the 10,000th visitor. Owner Herschell (John Littlefield) turns up and invites them to the VIP maze, where they can win $5000 if they solve it quickly enough (the prize actually jumps to $10k whilst they talk if they solve it even quicker). They are taken off into the maze and, clearly, will be hunted – Herschell is the family patriarch.

Gemma with brother

The trope of splitting up is deftly done. There are five separate maze paths and, by splitting up (not taking the middle path at Herschell’s suggestion) they have more chance of winning the money. After a bit of lame haunt moments (with staff not part of the family) they are attacked and taken in (preferably alive and intact – though this is clearly not the case with one of the friends). Why? Here is our vampiric bit and, to be fair, some strange pseudoscience. Apparently, the woman killed at the head of the film by the naked victim was the clan mother and a geneticist. She discovered a new gene that has been appearing only over the last 30-years.

harvesting skin

This gene is in the skin and so the victims are wanted for skin harvesting, which is then treated, turned to liquid and made into a face-cream that literally halts aging. So, it is science creating a fountain of youth through the death of someone. One of the friends is a predicted super-host (the real reason for the mark on the hands). That person needs to be kept alive to work out why the skin has so much of the gene. If they die the skin fights to stay alive, using osmosis of anything in the environment that it can (which will spoil any experimental results) and can stay alive weeks after death. Gemma is now the scientist and they have only just managed to replicate mum’s results it seems. The beauty cream aspect and experimentation is somehow undermined by the farm location (despite a brief shot of some lab-coated persons). It does offer a vampire as capitalist aspect (which is foreshadowed/underscored by the kids claiming to be children of Republicans and “all about the Benjamins”) that is expanded on in film 2.

masked killer

The whole set-up seems really convoluted (there must be an easier way of getting victims) and the science utterly pseudo but it was something different to the norm for a slasher. The film is fairly short, the characters absolutely stereotypes (and knowingly so), there are some nicely sassy lines (cf. Gemma remonstrating with one of her masked brothers at him calling someone a lesbian because she is deemed a strong woman). It is pretty nicely filmed too. It won’t set the world on fire but there is a vampiric science here. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK