Studio: Shudder/RLJE Films
Director: Spider One
Writer: Spider One
Producer: Spider One
Stars: John Ennis, Krsy Fox, Bryce Johnson, Edward Hong, Adam Marcinowski, Scout Compton, Adam Busch, Josephine Chang
Review Score:
Summary:
Struggling writers, artists, and musicians find their greatest creative fears realized as they encounter supernatural murderers, demons, and otherworldly evil.
Review:
Usually when people say a commercially released movie “looks like a student film,” they’re being hyperbolic in addition to being intentionally crass. Same as when someone tells me I write like a third-grader and I wonder, in what way does my arrangement of words sound like anything an eight-year-old would write? It’s just a common insult. But when I say “Allegoria” looks like a student film, it’s not because I want to be reductively mean. It’s because “Allegoria” legitimately looks like a bunch of amateur actors and non-union crew had a vague idea of how to go about making a movie, totally winged it, and now their ugly Frankenstein experiment is lumbering out of a dinky DTV lab only to keel right over after taking its first faltering step.
“Allegoria” marks another attempt by a noted rock musician, in this case Powerman 5000 frontman Spider One, to branch out into horror. While nowhere near as absurdly abysmal as Glenn Danzig’s “Verotika” (review here), Spider One still has quite a mountain to climb if he hopes to catch up to older brother Rob Zombie. “Allegoria” comes billed as an anthology where “a group of artist’s (sic) lives become unwittingly entangled as their obsessions and insecurities manifest monsters, demons and death.” Really, it’s more of a collection of half-formed ideas loosely lumped together into a 67-minute feature film.
“Allegoria’s” first vignette features an abrasive acting teacher who’s a pretentious prick. He tries inspiring his class by barking bizarre instructions like “I want the hot breath of a thousand rapists and murderers to enter you” and “Your neck is a snake, choking on a carcass twice its size” as he prompts them to figuratively summon their inner monsters as a performance technique. Except one of the students literally transforms into a monster and attacks him. That’s it. No seriously, that’s the whole point of the piece. No story, just a setup and punchline. The only thing more distracting than the dismal dialogue is the constant spray of spittle jumping out of the mouth of an actor who seems to be screaming, “Who wants COVID?”
The carousel of rude dudes reciting overwrought lines continues with the second segment, where a tortured artist motivates his reflection by repeating, “Others have seen what is and ask, why? I have seen what could be and ask, why not?” into a mirror. Next, he clutches his stomach, sees a ghoul wearing a Party City costume of “Return of the Living Dead’s” Tarman cut his doppelganger’s throat, then that ghoul finishes a painting of the artist’s decapitation. Or something. Here you’ll find the biggest distraction to be some truly grating music, which sounds as though it was composed by someone who could only play an out-of-tune piano with a closed fist falling on single notes.
Nothing says “thrilling audiovisual entertainment” quite like five full minutes of a seated screenwriter typing while narrating the scene he is crafting via voiceover. That’s how short #3 starts. It ends with the killer from his script inexplicably coming to life and beating him to a bloody pulp. If only such a fantasy were possible, someone could have preemptively prevented “Allegoria” from existing.
B-movie maven Scout Compton, credited here without the “Taylor” in between, shows up for chapter four. Compton often takes heat from horror fans who give her a hard time for one imaginary reason or another, but honestly, her performance is the only remotely believable one in the movie. She’s also the only recognizable face in a blur of forgettable ones. Too bad her segment revolves around ten minutes of talking to a man she just went on a date with as “Allegoria” yet again huffs and puffs to get to a gory stinger that has the impact of a whip made from wet linguini with a cottonball spike.
“Allegoria” has a fifth segment that kind of sort of ties its other pieces together with tangential links, e.g. a phone call someone makes here was heard from the other end earlier. To tell the truth though, I’m already so exhausted by the movie that I have no desire to even do a single sentence recap punctuated by a snarky comment about how it too has nearly no narrative substance. A virtual yawn will have to suffice. As for the overall effort, let’s just say that the only entertaining moment in “Allegoria” comes from imagining Uncork’d and Wild Eye reps seeing the Shudder and RLJE Films company cards and asking, “Wait, this wasn’t released by one of us?”
Review Score: 30
It is moderately compelling in the moment, but it has a hard time holding up to even cursory scrutiny as far as believable “found footage” concepts go.