The Void is a horror film, from directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steve Kostanski (who, according to IMDB, have worked in the art and makeup departments of such masterpieces as Suicide Squad, the new Total Recall and the new Robocop). After making the film festival rounds since 2016, it finally came to Dallas this past weekend as part of the Dallas International Film Festival.
There had been a good amount of buzz following this movie, due to word-of-mouth and a killer red-band trailer. But, despite all the hype, I found it to be more of a nod to (better) genre films that came before it, including The Thing and Hellraiser, with a little Lovecraftian inspiration thrown in. It never really comes into its own.
The film starts with a cop finding an bloody man, rushing to a nearby hospital that is severely understaffed. From there, the film wastes no time diving into the violence and promised gore, raising the tension all the way until the rolling of the credits.
Despite the great atmosphere, however, the movie is only 90 minutes because, where The Void excels in creature effects and gore, it suffers from cliches, bad characters and stilted dialogue. You can still be a “B-movie throwback” and have a strong script (ask John Carpenter how he did it, I guess).
There is a lot to love if you are a horror fan. It’s bloody and the creep factor is pretty effective at just keeping you on edge (at least until it goes full Hellraiser 2). And, I have to say again, the practical creature effects are awesomely gross, which really helps because, if it was a bunch of bad CGI this movie would have suffered even more on top of its weak characters.
Again, there is not much at all to the characters: they are just surface-deep horror cliches. When the movie ended, I still didn’t know if the characters actually resolved anything but the journey was fun and pretty fast paced so that maybe helped with the shallow characters because I was never bored.
The Void is definitely not a perfect movie but it’s fun and messed up enough that if you are into blood-filled cosmic horror (very specific, I know) then I would totally recommend watching it at least once. The people who made this movie obviously have a love for the genre and I can only hope they keep doing this and getting better. For a low-budget movie, I can’t complain that much because it’s better than most of the wide release rubbish that we get and there were enough “Oh shit!” moments to keep this horror fan happy.
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The Void is out now in limited release but available everywhere via VOD.
