GLORIOUS (2022)

Studio:     Shudder
Director:    Rebekah McKendry
Writer:     Joshua Hull, David Ian McKendry, Todd Rigney
Producer:  Bob Portal, Joe Wicker, Morgan Peter Brown, Jason Scott Goldberg, Christian Armogida, Inderpal Singh
Stars:     Ryan Kwanten, J.K. Simmons, Sylvia Grace Crim, Andre Lamar, Tordy Clark

Review Score:

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Summary:

A heartbroken man lands in an unlikely position to potentially save the universe when he becomes mysteriously trapped inside a rest stop bathroom with a cosmic creature.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Seemingly devastated by a recent breakup with his ex-girlfriend Brenda, Wes stops at a remote rest area to collect himself after an exhausting drive. Wes ends up as the only person at the rest stop after having an odd encounter with a trucker named Sharon.

Wes’s trauma gets triggered by a teddy bear Brenda gave him as a gift. Unanswered calls to Brenda cause Wes to break his phone in frustration. Wes gets drunk on a bottle of whiskey, burns a collection of Polaroids in a fire pit, and eventually passes out on the ground. Cosmic light bathes Wes while he is unconscious.

Wes wakes the next morning to discover he set fire to his pants. Wes rushes into the men’s restroom to vomit.

Wes enters into an ongoing conversation with a voice coming from a gloryhole on the partition shared with an adjacent stall. The unseen entity claims to be a demigod with a nearly unpronounceable name, so Wes calls it Gath for short.

Gath warns Wes to not look at it. Wes tries anyway, which causes a painful, hallucinatory vision in which Wes sees Brenda transform into a creature.

Wes discovers he is inexplicably locked inside the bathroom. Gath cryptically claims that Wes will be unable to leave until they “are done here.” Wes looks outside to see Gath camouflaged the building with cosmic waves. After talking about how Brenda is tied to his agitation and misery, Gath tells Wes that fate drew them together into that bathroom to fulfill a specific purpose. Gath additionally warns that gazing upon its true form would cause Wes to transform into an unfathomably foul beast.

Wes tries to escape through a vent, but the duct mysteriously leads him back to the same bathroom. Wes asks Gath what he needs to do in order to be allowed to leave. Gath tells Wes that the universe has a favor to ask of him.

Gath tells Wes about its creation. Gath explains that its elder god “father” birthed Gath to annihilate all life in the universe. Gath’s demigod siblings imprisoned their father to stop its destructive madness, but the elder entity escaped. It now searches for Gath so Gath can finally transcend its ethereal form and become corporeal, which will in turn end the universe. Gath reveals that Wes has been chosen to satisfy Gath’s physical needs so its evolution can be prevented.

Property supervisor Gary arrives outside. Despite Gath warning against drawing Gary’s attention, Wes pleads for help. Gary enters the bathroom, but allows the door to lock behind him, trapping both men inside with Gath. While Wes mentally escapes to a memory of meeting Brenda at a backyard party, Gath turns the entire restroom into a gruesome bloodbath by brutally slaughtering Gary.

With Gath still insisting that all of creation is at stake, Wes asks what he specifically needs to do. Gath claims Wes needs to satisfy it physically. Afterward, Gath will return to its ethereal form and its father will be unable to find it. Believing Gath wants to give him oral sex, Wes puts his penis through the gloryhole. Gath explains that he actually wants a piece of Wes’s liver, and Wes must cut it out himself with a shard of broken mirror glass.

When Wes refuses, Gath calls him selfish. Wes tells the story of his mother being driven to suicide by his abusive father who called her selfish.

Gath challenges Wes’s inability to face his true feelings by asking if he would cut out his liver for Brenda. Wes reflects on his relationship with Brenda. Gath brings up how breaking Brenda’s trust caused them both severe emotional devastation when Wes thought Brenda could be different from previous women.

Wes angrily shouts at Gath through the gloryhole. Catching a brief glimpse of the creature causes another disturbing vision in which Brenda’s teddy bear devours Wes.

Wes screams for Gath’s father to come for Gath. The building begins breaking apart in a cosmic storm. Gath warns Wes that he can’t let the world end this way, because if it does, Brenda will disappear with it and her memory will be worth nothing.

Wes says he will do what Gath asks if he can see Brenda one more time. Gath shows Wes the happy memory of when she gifted him the teddy bear. Yet when Wes painfully cuts out his liver, another flashback reveals Wes was actually a serial killer, and he murdered Brenda after she discovered his Polaroid collection of tortured victims.

Gath’s tentacles consume Wes’s liver. The stall door opens. Wes sees Gath’s true form as he is bathed in a blinding light.

Wes wakes up bleeding on the floor of an empty bathroom. Gath’s disembodied voice tells Wes it returned to the ether and the cosmic threat has passed. Wes wonders if he is a hero who saved the universe. Gath counters that they are both beings of pure destruction, and Wes will be forgotten because it’s what he deserves. Gath’s presence vanishes.

With the door now unlocked, Wes crawls outside. Wes finally succumbs to death while clutching Brenda’s teddy bear.

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Review:

Whether a movie was acquired as a finished product, or purposely produced for a certain company from the get-go, it’s funny how every genre label still seems to have a telltale “look” to their titles. Sure, they take a lot of dinky Amityville detritus from the same handful of DIY filmmakers, but there’s a milky shot-on-digital halo that always lets you know when you’re watching a backyard B-flick from Wild Eye Releasing. Lines get blurred a bit when it comes to distinguishing Dread Presents from Uncork’d Entertainment, though the comparative quality of their casts and whether or not the camera can stand still usually offer some clues. As for bigger brands, Blumhouse joints are generally easy to spot no matter if they’re on a million dollar budget or a ten million dollar one. And when someone speaks about an “A24 aesthetic,” you immediately know exactly what that means.

Shudder has developed a distinct look to most of their feature films too, especially with offerings that originate from their office. Even though they rotate creators as well as the conditions they work under, it’s safe to say Shudder originals have a particular patina. For better or for worse depending on what you think of the TV show, that look tends to fall in line with the common atmosphere of a typical “Creepshow” episode. Small casts with at least one known name. Single locations constructed on a soundstage. Colorful lights. Limited, throwback FX. A menacing monster of some sort. “Tales from the Darkside” used this itinerary to put horror on the small screen in the ‘80s, making the “Creepshow” comparison fitting as a contemporary equivalent.

I don’t know if “Glorious” was expressly made for Shudder or if it was a pickup, though I’m inclined to think it was the former. Right away, the movie reminded me of “Revealer,” another Shudder movie, which got me thinking about how Shudder’s films often share similar features. “Glorious” and “Revealer” (review here) both tie themselves to a primary pair trapped in a small space while an apocalyptic event unfolds outside. Their posters and production design both employ the same pink and purple lighting scheme for cosmic backdrops. But the big difference between “Glorious” and “Revealer,” and many of Shudder’s lower-tier films for that matter, is that “Glorious” does a lot with a little, turning itself into a Doctor Who TARDIS whose interior is impossibly more expansive than what outside appearances suggest.

As usual with such endeavors, the premise is simple. Wes (Ryan Kwanten, who not-so-coincidentally appeared on a Season Two episode of “Creepshow”) needs to collect himself after a bad breakup. Following an exhausting car ride, Wes stops at a remote rest area, spends the evening indulging in a drunken breakdown, and wakes the following morning in desperate need of a toilet to vomit into. I suppose he could have puked on the ground outside instead of running into the rest stop’s bathroom, but then where would the story be?

The 12 minutes it takes to get to this point aren’t the most engaging moments ever captured on camera. Then again, you’re going to be inside the restroom for the next hour, so enjoy the fresh exterior air while you can.

I wondered how an indie horror movie made for streaming landed Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons as a co-star. However, he only appears via voiceover. Not saying he wasn’t worth it, he always is, but producers probably flipped him 10-20k for a couple of hours in an audio booth and he never saw the set in Mississippi.

Simmons provides the voice of “Gath.” In expected eldritch god fashion, Gath’s full name is nearly unpronounceable by human tongues, so Wes comes to call him Gath for short. His words echoing out of a gloryhole colorfully painted to look like a fantastic monster from the Cthulhu mythos, Gath claims the universe deliberately brought Wes and Gath to that men’s room to fulfill an important purpose. Hidden by the toilet stall’s partition, Gath supernaturally seals the bathroom as Wes enters a netherworld nightmare designed to force him to face his feelings, and to face frightening truths that could trigger the end of the world.

Being creative with the camera is a tricky task when 90% of a movie only deals with two characters interacting in one room. In this situation specifically, a short shooting schedule makes it tempting to just capture a certain amount of B-roll since one of those characters is literally a hole in the wall. Tilt and pan across the makeshift monster mural a few times. Maybe zoom or dolly in and out once or twice. Get static cutaways and then simply splice in a few random seconds whenever it’s Gath’s turn to occupy the screen in the edit bay. Voila. Gath’s complete coverage could be knocked out in a matter of minutes.

Instead of taking that easy way out, director Rebekah McKendry and cinematographer David Matthews repeatedly go out of their way to find new places to put the camera so every conceivable inch of the set ends up with an angle. By nature of its scaled-down setup, “Glorious” runs the risk of quickly getting redundant since it could rely on nothing more than swapping back and forth between the same two shots when Wes and Gath talk. But because they recognize a visual storytelling medium has a unique opportunity to affect the flow of a stationary chamber play, McKendry and Matthews break through the barriers of their budget by constantly keeping the camera fluid.

Even during a scene where Wes crawls through a ventilation duct, there’s a moment when the camera twists on its axis when it would have been less work to anchor it in one position. Now, there’s a narrative reason for this shot that has to do with changing planes and defying gravity. But it’s still a tremendous amount of inventive effort from everyone involved to make sure “Glorious” remains immersive in spite of the fact that so many minutes consist of a one-on-one conversation.

McKendry also appears to have a stopwatch set to alert her whenever too much time gets spent on any single thing. At regular intervals, Wes experiences several flashbacks to his past and hallucinations about the present that temporarily take us out of the bathroom for necessary breaks. In addition to being mindful of potential problems with the viewer’s patience, there’s a similar sense about savvy timing with a handful of good gags based on precise editing.

Speaking of gags, note that “Glorious” is not a riotous romp kind of horror-comedy. It’s fantasy-horror frosted with occasional hints of humor, despite the part of the plot that implies a bathroom blowjob could be key to saving the entire universe. The gloryhole aspect allows for a few jokes, and ensures the movie never takes itself with absolute seriousness, but it doesn’t factor into the film with the irreverence you might assume. Tone intentionally favors frights over funniness.

If you like Lovecraft, a light lick of looniness, and can allow your imagination to spackle over holes poked by a tight and thrifty production, give the movie a go. “Glorious” squeezes out more scope, story, and even ethereal eeriness than many of its straight-to-streaming peers would even think possible given how little room there tends to be in Shudder’s sandbox.

Review Score: 75

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