DARK HAUL (2014)

Studio:       SyFy
Director:    Daniel Wise
Writer:       Ben Crane
Producer:  Andrew Gernhard, Zach O’Brien, Kevin Shea
Stars:     Tom Sizemore, Evalena Marie, Rick Ravanello, Kevin Shea, Anthony Del Negro, Adrienne LaValley

Review Score:

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Summary:

An ancient prophecy is revealed when a devilish creature and its half-human sister break free after 300 years of imprisonment.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Pine Barrens, New Jersey – 1735 – Fulfilling a prophecy that the thirteenth child of a thirteenth child will be born both man and beast, a woman dies giving birth to monstrous twins. Zib is a human girl with strange powers and a tail while her brother is a bat-like beast. An order called “The Keepers” severs Zib’s tail and imprisons her alongside her brother, using her psychic bond with him to keep the monster under control for 300 years.

Present Day – An assault team searches for Zib and her escaped brother, who uses its ability to induce hallucinations to evade capture. Zib and the beast are eventually recaptured.

Father Tito suggests transporting the monster to consecrated ground in Bally, Pennsylvania for safekeeping. As the unit leader for The Keepers, Damon oversees the truck transport operation and assigns Knicks to keep watch over Zib.

With the team stopped at a hotel for the night, Father Tito and Knicks convince Damon that The Keepers should finally just kill the creature. Knicks also recommends killing Zib, but Damon refuses as he grown enamored with the girl. After Zib sneaks out of her room and helps her brother wreak more hallucinatory havoc, Knicks takes over the transport operation by sending Damon away at gunpoint.

As the transport rig draws closer to the Pine Barrens, the creature’s ability to induce hallucinations grows stronger. Following several more incidents that result in the deaths of Father Tito and many other Keepers, the monster causes the 18-wheeler carrying its cage to overturn and the beast escapes.

Knowing that the beast will return to its birthplace, Knicks escorts Zib and the remaining Keepers to the remote cabin where Zib and her brother were born. They find Damon already there. As Damon and Knicks have another standoff, the creature attacks, forcing everyone to join forces in fortifying the cabin.

Knicks, Damon, and Zib return to the overturned truck to retrieve holy relics for combating the monster. Following a physical confrontation between the two men, Knicks forces Damon outside the circle of protection and the creature kills Damon.

Knicks and Zib return to the cabin. Zib breaks free of her restraints and kills several of the Keepers before being recaptured. The creature then returns and kills the remaining Keepers. Zib attacks Knicks while he unsuccessfully tries fending off the creature. While dying, Knicks realizes that the prophecy he assumed foretold a showdown between man and beast actually referred to a confrontation between sister and brother.

Zib re-grows her tail and is forced to fight her out of control brother. The beast impales Zib, but she manages to decapitate her brother and kill it.

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Review:

If you live in a world where the thirteenth child of a thirteenth child is prophesized to be born half-man and half-beast, and you yourself are a thirteenth child who already has twelve children, maybe you shouldn’t roll the dice on impregnating your wife one more time.  But, with frumpy-dressed Colonial Era goodwives being so irresistibly sexy, some ill-advised pseudo-stud does it anyway, leading to the 1735 birth of monstrous twins: a human girl with a tail and a winged beast with the power to induce hallucinatory visions.

Rather than killing the foul creature while it is still the size of a bat, a bat that takes a shortcut out of its mother’s womb through her stomach, some religious weirdos instead form a secret society dedicated to guarding the imprisoned siblings and arguing about whether or not to kill them for 300 years.  By 2014, “The Keepers” have traded their powdered wigs for assault rifles and plain black hoodies in a fashionable look that says, “all of our overflow expenses came out of the wardrobe budget.”  Up the hoods go on their sweatshirts and the unit sets out to transport the creature and its psychically-bonded sister on a Jersey Devil journey to fulfill an ancient prophecy (read: some mumbo-jumbo).

Written by one man and directed by another with no other related credits to their names, “Dark Haul” is the work of either pseudonyms or first-timers.  The latter is likely since the movie’s odd hybrid of real actors and regular dudes smashed in a smorgasbord of mismatched cinema stylings suggests neophytes scraping things together with friends rounding out the cast and pages from a freshman year film textbook filling in the blanks.

When the big rig transport carrying the creature cage first fires up, the sequence is packaged in a montage of predictable insert shots rolling through close-ups of a boot on a pedal, a hand on the gearshift, an accelerating dashboard needle, and black smoke puffing out the cab-top exhaust pipe.  Slow motion initially used solely for the heightened drama of loading the cage on the truck makes a repeat appearance for a bullet-riddled gunfight later in the film.  Aside from that and the creature-cam POV, one-off shots like a face-pointed chest mount and a boom crane sweep never show up a second time.  Capped by the telltale warble of a Wilhelm scream, “Dark Haul” is an assembly of film technique test drives employed with little rhyme and less of a reason.

Knicks is the agent in charge of the creature’s escort entourage.  If Knicks’ face were an emoticon, it would be :/.  He is determined to see his mission completed in spite of a “whatever” attitude turning his head in a forward-slash grimace whenever someone above thinks to know better than he.  That attitude of entitled incredulity wafting through an air of veteran grit makes the character a perfect fit for actor Tom Sizemore, possibly channeling the same feeling he has about the project.

Having worked with Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann, and Oliver Stone, seeing Sizemore play a standard tough guy gunman in a straightforward SyFy Channel creature feature is akin to watching Kareem Abdul-Jabbar play charity basketball on the island of Lilliput.  It’s not a playoff-caliber effort, but then, no one needs him to do more than dribble the ball and tower over everyone else in what basically amounts to a half-speed exhibition game.

“Dark Haul” tumbles along tolerably enough for the mild made-for-cable horror it has on hand, actually arriving at its third act so fast that the tempo pauses for a boredom-inducing exposition chunk as the remaining guardians regroup, formulate plans, reiterate the plot, and go about chasing down the creature’s escaped sister Zib for the umpteenth time.  No matter how many times she breaks free of her restraints, which happens whenever the script runs out of something for everyone to do, i.e. often, Knicks and the others still can’t break their habit of taking eyes off Zib repeatedly.  Although they always recapture her anyway, so maybe there is no real cause for alarm.

“Dark Haul” is such an average movie that it deserves an average rating.  It isn’t as much fun as a lowbrow monster movie can be, yet it isn’t an affront to the eyes and the ears, either.  At best, the movie is an “I guess it wasn’t that bad” lark.  At worst, it’s another forgettable 85 minutes added to the countless others misspent on a fascination for B-movies with more head-shakers than head-turners.

Review Score:  50

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