The Sanctuary – review

Director: Allen Kool

Release date: 2019

Contains spoilers

So, I watched the film The Taste of Blood without realising that it followed this film (set some twenty years earlier). The sequel had plenty of narrative weaknesses. This part was narratively stronger due to it being, I think, simpler in premise. That is not to say it had a strong sense of narrative, nor that it didn’t have other weaknesses. However, I do think it held together better than the sequel – up to a point.

murder

The film starts with a campfire and a group of (mostly) kids telling scary stories – grandpa (James M Jenkinson) takes over the telling and the story he offers is this film. The start of his story talks about a couple, Wade (Dylen Michael Guiry) and his girlfriend. He sees she has a bloke’s card with a number on it – gets jealous and psychotic and kills her (the murder hidden behind a fade to black and then seeing her corpse in a bathtub). He is arrested – and apparently holding him amounts to cuffing him to a pipe (one assumes that the town was too small for more than a single holding cell, already full).

Dylen Michael Guiry as Wade

The Sheriff, Glen (Drew Riedstra), transports Wade and car thief Henry (Ed Robinson) to the Penitentiary but, out in the countryside something hits the windscreen and he crashes. Glen is killed and Wade manages to break out of the car and get Glen’s handcuff keys and gun. Henry asks for help, he knows where they can lay low but Wade breaks his neck. Now, Dylen Michael Guiry doesn’t seem too built and whilst his character is unhinged the ability to, cold, break another’s neck in one easy move seemed… implausible.

John-Riley O'Handley as Nate

By the time Glen is overdue and the transport found Wade has got far away, dunked himself accidentally in a river and there’s been a storm and so the cops have no idea where he is. Nate Fields (John-Riley O'Handley) is drafted in as temporary sheriff… Wade meanwhile has stumbled across a farm in the dark and ended up with a rifle pressed against his back. The owner is the elderly Harley Whalen (Rick Amsbury) but his wife Edna (Lawrene Denkers) tells Harley to put the gun down and brings Wade in to offer a hot bath and hot meal.

The Whalens

There are two issues here, one of the film’s making and one of my own. The film’s is that whilst the section of Wade ingratiating himself with the Whalens worked to a degree it was hamstrung by two things – firstly it was hard to buy Guiry’s performance – for instance his smiles whilst he had a rifle at his back struck more as sneers, he played overtly saccharine but had mini rages when not observed and one felt he just didn’t had the nuance needed – he needed a performance more like Sting's in Brimstone and treacle and didn’t have the chops for it. The other thing was there wasn’t enough atmosphere built by the director, making us fear for the old couple.

watching

The issue that was my own making was the (SPOILER) knowledge that the Whalens are cannibal killers, due to having watched the sequel first – but because they were drawn as doddering oldsters Wade never felt in peril (and we had no sympathy for him). What I had hoped was that the connection to (I’m guessing) Sawney Bean would be explicit – but no, just a mention of an old Scottish clan, destroyed with unspeakable things done to the men and the women burned alive. The film is also not explicit when it comes to the supernatural element – we see them younger and we see them eating meat (not explicitly stated as human) and no explicit connection between the two – though it is through cannibalism that they get physically younger.

Rick Amsbury as Harley

However, up to the point of Wade in the household the film does hold itself together better than the sequel. However, it has Nate go to the house (not see Wade and get fed a story about a visiting grandson) and a cliff-hanger around Wade and Harley and then cuts forward and concentrates on Nate – giving us backstory we don’t need for this character (in this film at least) and dragging the pace down to that of a snail. It has been months when he discovers that the Whalens never had grandchildren and goes out to see them again.

bloodied knife

Beyond this the makeup for the Whalens works, as it does in the sequel, and we spend more time with them (or so it feels) which is no bad thing as Amsbury and Denkers work well in their roles – though more tension would have helped that section of the film. I really want to give this the benefit of the doubt – the shying away from explicit violence meant that complex sfx were not necessary but also missed a beat for the horror fan, until the soap opera of Nate’s life the pace worked better and whilst there were filmmaking faux pas it did try and hold its own. Unfortunately Guiry wasn’t experienced enough to carry this, and it needed a strong primary villain (especially as the Whalen aspect was meant to be hidden for most of the film). 3.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

The Taste of Blood – review

Director: Allen Kool

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

It is important, I think, for films to enunciate their story – not all films, some hinge on obscurity, or capturing a moment rather than narrative, but for the main it is a rule of thumb that’s rather important. This film doesn’t do that well – for instance we understand that the film centres on cannibals but only know that they are “cannibals in the 20th century, descendants from the an (sic) old Scottish family from the 16th century” via IMDb – the film doesn’t mention this.

meat

It might seem an unimportant detail but it is part of the story and other more important details are also lost. I assume that this ties the antagonists to the Sawney Bean legend – but I don’t know for sure. I might be doing the filmmakers a disservice as I discovered that this would seem to be a sequel (to a film called the Sanctuary, which features the same antagonists) but that is not clear and, whilst I’ll search that film out, I hadn’t seen it when I watched this.

Erica Sherwood as Janet

So, after an opening where we see reverend Janet (Erica Sherwood) imposed against the countryside (with a suggestion she is dead and the character does meet her end in film), in which she talks about evil, we see a man trekking through the snow. He is shot and then we see a figure dragging his body on a sledge. The film cuts a chapel, specifically the stained-glass window and blood trickling on it, as opening credits roll.

Nate and Dan

Nate (Timothy Paul McCarthy) is asleep and the sleep is disturbed, memories invading it. As I watched first time I didn’t know, but I now suspect the dreams are from the Sanctuary. Nate is a drunk PI, living in a mobile home and long since estranged from his law enforcement job. His friend Dan (Daryl Marks) comes to see him, he has solid work for him but Nate has spent 20 years obsessing about the Whalens, Harley (Rick Amsbury) and Edna (Lawrene Denkers) – cannibals who he is sure are still out there.

Lawrene Denkers as Edna

Dan suggests that they would be over 100 and likely dead but Nate is convinced that eating flesh makes them younger – which is how they escaped last time – and they are still out there. So, this is our vampiric aspect, eating flesh to gain/maintain youth. When we meet the pair we see they are now very old looking – the aging makeup, whilst clearly makeup, was rather well done. As the film progresses, we discover that Edna believes the flesh isn’t working anymore.

Hope and her doppelgänger

We discover they are living in a large house/hotel (closed currently) in Canada with a young woman called Hope (Amelia Phillips). Hope talks often to what might be a projection of a second personality or a twin (I suspect the former but the film didn’t make that clear). The other one doesn’t like the fact that Hope has found religion and, as the film progresses, a boyfriend, Jacob (Darius Rathe). Meanwhile Nate gets a lead on the Whalens and goes after them.

cgi fire

The filmmakers did do quite a bit with a low budget but some of the cgi they used just looked a bit false – I get it was a large building on fire and the budget will dictate the methodology used, but there was some blood/wounding effects that looked poor. I wanted the narrative to be a bit more explicit (as I mentioned at the start), I didn’t overly develop much empathy with Hope (the entire romance seemed just a little bit trite), nor with Nate… There wasn’t much of a horror element drawn with the Whalens, indeed there were moments with victims that we see little and then it felt that they were forgotten about – making the entire horror/gore side seem dodged.

crumble to dust

There is a supernatural element to their longevity and on death their bodies crumble (though the cgi effect wasn’t great). There are moments with Hope that seem to show her as immaterial, which seemed odd, and we do see eyes turn red. There isn’t much other lore communicated. I can see the effort that went into this but there were elements that just didn’t work for me – elements where I think lack of experience caused the filmmakers to either miss or gloss over, which might have ramped the horror, the tension or developed the characters. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Use of Tropes: Sawney: Flesh of Man

Also known as Lord of Darkness, this was a 2012 feature directed by Ricky Wood and concentrates on surviving members of Sawney Bean’s clan.

You are probably aware that Sawney Bean was, allegedly, the head of a 16th century Scottish clan said to have cannibalised over 1000 victims in a 25-year period. Though whether this is legend, fact or partly factual is contested. This film takes the premise that it was fact and that one member of the Bean clan escaped punishment and that his descendants continued the practice through to the modern day.

There is a prologue set in 1990, with a doctor brought into the highlands, and into a lair behind a waterfall, to deliver a baby. The mother chained, covered in sores and with sackcloth hiding her face (though she is clearly violent and grunting monstrously). You can guess the fate of the doctor. Jump forward to the modern day and English reporter Hamish MacDonald (Samuel Feeney) is investigating the murder of his ex’s sister and generally annoying the police.

close up shot

As things turn out she was killed by Sawney (David Hayman), as this member of the clan is called, and he hunts in a taxi – picking up the vulnerable and taking them to the highland lair. In the lair, mother is locked behind an iron door, but the reason for this article are the two sons (I guess) who aid him. They are an inbred family, it is clear, and it is in their looks that I saw our vampire connection – with long sharp talon like nails, sharp teeth and faces deformed in such a way as to remind someone of Vamp face in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Their eyes are unnaturally pale. 

kung fu?

They are also highly acrobatic and fight as though they were born knowing kung fu (perhaps another Buffy influence) and they tend to use scythes as a weapon of choice. One thing that struck me was the fact that they move through the city, when taken there by Sawney, menacing in their hoodies. This wearing of hoodies as a modern and inner-city menace (despite their rural origin/home) kind of connects them textually to films such as Citadel. Other than this we have, of course, cannibalism and a lot of tying that into religious mantra, centred around communion (so both flesh eating and blood drinking), but other than talking of everlasting life there is no indication that these are anything other than mortal and it is their looks (with their mother being similar when we see her) that is the vampire trope it relies on.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK