Circle City Supernatural – review

Director: J.P. Leck

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

This portmanteau film had an interesting conceit in that the wraparound was a radio show with host Lindsay Mallyn (Lindsay Leck), engineered by Sylvia Flores (Patty Najera-Esparza) and they were taking calls from citizens of Circle City who were telling their true tales of the supernatural on Halloween.

The segments of the films were then the stories but the interesting twist to this was that the caller told the story all the way through and the scenes complemented the voice rather than became the whole narrative – there was, therefore, a bit of an old-time radio feel to this.

Lindsay Leck as Lindsay

The stories were very inventive, for the most part, but lacked some level of bite due to the fact that, as the protagonist of the tale was the caller, you knew that there was no ultimate peril within the story. They also suffered due to budget. Take the zombie tale, which was a mother (Laura Morrison Richcreek) relating the dream her son (J.J. Taylor) had in detention, which she claims was a vision of the future – we see a too decayed to move zombie, detail lost in a hazmat suit, and a moving body bag but no other one despite the caller saying the school was full of them. The first story, Do Not Disturb, was an example of the interesting ones where the caller, Melody (Julia Leslie), walks through a mysterious door standing alone in a field and ends up in an old hotel. She recognised that this was something that took the form of the building to trap her but ultimately wanted to devour her.

Hudson Leck as Johnny

The vampire story was Fertile Ground where John (Dennis Hanley) calls in and tells the story from his childhood, when he was still called Johnny (Hudson Leck), and he was dared to go trick or treating in an abandoned part of town – whilst there seems no logic to this, it worked in that ‘kids and dares’ sort of way. Apparently that part of town was deserted after ‘the blight’ forced everyone out, the source being a carnivorous plant called the Thicket that attacked for blood. The detail that sunlight killed the plant was also mentioned, causing Lindsay to exclaim about vampire plants from Transylvania.

fighting the Thicket

The name the Thicket came from a man who died with the last seed and it had grown from his decaying flesh. As we follow Johnny deeper into a house he thought still occupied (though he found no-one), we end up descending into the cellar with him and there is what is left of the Thicket. There is also an old-fashioned pump sprayer. The plant is dormant and Johnny realises this as it emerges from dormancy as he touches it and the plant attacks – he fights back with the sprayer and escapes, though he takes a scarlet ‘acorn’ with him. He later figures out that the Thicket had been feeding on rats and the sprayer was rat poison – Warfarin based – and the plant was already dying having drunk the blood thinner from the rats. John is now dying and he intends to put the acorn in his coffin…

mysterious door

The story was interesting and it is always good to get a vampire plant. The plant itself was a puppet with a red metal maw that looked a tad silly, unfortunately, and it is another sign of the ideas the filmmakers had being grander than their budget would allow (puppets appeared in several stories, working best in the actual haunted puppets story). So, there are some good ideas here, some really good ones, if I’m fair, but the conceit that feeds them also hamstrings them by taking away peril (as I mentioned). The film has its flaws certainly but I have to admire the inventive concepts and the effort to reach beyond the budget. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK