Studio: Dread Presents
Director: Andy Collier, Tor Mian
Writer: Tor Mian, Andy Collier
Producer: Ross Scaife, Sean Knopp, Andy Collier, Tor Mian
Stars: Sophie Stevens, Ludovic Hughes, Lukas Loughran, Johanna Adde Dahl, Barbara Crampton
Review Score:
Summary:
A pregnant couple encounters a cult that worships an aquatic deity when they travel to Norway to claim an inheritance.
Review:
Barbara Crampton is horror royalty. Her popular pairing with Jeffrey Combs in a certain seminal Stuart Gordon work instantly endeared her to genre film fans. Subsequent appearances in another notable Lovecraft adaptation, cults classics like “Chopping Mall,” and a handful of fun Full Moon features continued paving a long path to her well-earned icon status.
Crampton took a break from acting around the turn of the millennium. When she returned to regular roles roughly a decade later, fright fans and filmmakers alike couldn’t have been giddier. The actress was red hot again, picking up right where she left off with profiled parts in acclaimed thrillers including Adam Wingard’s “You’re Next” (review here) and Rob Zombie’s “The Lords of Salem” (review here). Crampton stayed true to her roots too, making time for macabre midnighters like “We Are Still Here” (review here) as well as artistically intriguing indies such as “Sun Choke” (review here).
Her pedigree already made her a fan favorite. Then Crampton piled on additional affability by proving to be a kind human in real life as well. Openly accessible via social media, positive personal interactions cement Crampton as someone who is humbly appreciative of accolades and highly supportive of hard-working people pursuing creative passions. In short, it’s virtually impossible to not love her.
However, it is easy to not love the downward slide many of her DTV movies have been riding on recently. Crampton has featured in a heap of horror ranging from ho-hum to outright awful since at least 2015, and it’s nowhere near time for her to be in the “late-stage Lance Henriksen” phase of her career. Between “Day of Reckoning” (review here), “Death House” (review here), and “Dead Night” (review here), I’m hard pressed to pick which one is the most unwatchable. Between “Blood Brothers” (review here), “Reborn,” and “Stay Out Stay Alive,” I’m hard pressed to pick which one went the most unnoticed. Crampton should not be an Eric Roberts equivalent already, accepting offers to be in any autopilot B-movie as long as the pay is adequate and the hours are short. Whoever selects her projects ought to be more judicial about which scripts get a “yes” before “Crampton” becomes worth as much as “Sizemore.” That person can start by turning down things like “Sacrifice,” a waterlogged thriller that’s as pedestrian as its recycled title.
Inspired by Paul Kane’s short story ‘Men of the Cloth,’ “Sacrifice” chronicles the lukewarm Cthulhu-connected chills confronted by Isaac and his wife Emma. Isaac doesn’t really remember fleeing from a small Norwegian fishing village with his mother 25 years ago. But he’s back to claim an inheritance, so you know family secrets are going to complicate the couple’s trip. Since Emma is pregnant and the town appears populated by cultists, you also know her unborn baby will be integral to someone’s sinister plan, because where else can a plain premise go other than somewhere we’ve been umpteen times before?
Billed as a Lovecraft-like horror movie, “Sacrifice” doesn’t do anything as epic as actually showing a monster, or showing much of anything for that matter. Mostly, scenes consist of talking, some walking, and a lot more talking.
Desperate to keep the viewer’s pulse from deadening due to the conversational dullness and dreary tone, “Sacrifice” slips in very brief bursts of blood and tentacles. In every one of these instances, the terror turns out to be a hallucination of some sort. “Sacrifice” probably sets an unenviable record for the most egregious abuse of the “suddenly waking from a nightmare” trope in a single motion picture. When a supposedly scary script leans this hard on fleeting visions to falsify frights, it’s a simple matter to see that the story doesn’t have the substance to do the heavy lifting as horror.
In fairness to the filmmakers, they try. Smoky fog rolls in on the sides of a few shots. Trouble is, you can tell it comes from a smoke machine. Violet hues and other deep colors accent dreamy design schemes. It’s just that such lighting is nearly never motivated by a practical layout, unless Norwegian villagers decorate their homes like a set from “Suspiria.” More effort exists in “Sacrifice” than in 1,000 peer-level DIY indies combined. Good intentions aside, there’s still no escaping the audiovisual evidence outing “Sacrifice” as a pared-back production on par with other Dread Presents releases, which is barely above lesser labels in the same VOD space.
The only name among a cast of unknowns whose average acting demonstrates why they are unknowns, Barbara Crampton plays a local sheriff with a spotty Scandinavian speech pattern. Her awkward accent is distracting if we’re putting it kindly. Putting it more frankly, she probably shouldn’t have attempted the accent at all.
Without Barbara Crampton’s presence, there wouldn’t be a reason to notice “Sacrifice” in an endless ocean of indistinguishable “filler thrillers.” Obviously, that’s the whole point of paying someone of her stature to be in a B-movie. But the boost to an otherwise ignorable film comes at the expense of taxing the credit on Crampton’s account. I want to see a movie because Crampton is in it, not to sigh heavily and slog through something out of obligation to what she once represented. We’re not at ‘DEFCON-Malcolm McDowell’ yet. But “Sacrifice” brings Crampton dangerously closer. She deserves better movies. Perhaps more importantly, we deserve to see her in movies that are more worth our while.
Review Score: 40
Everyone else who has no problem with a fright flick that feels like “Lizzie McGuire” decided to get dark with a PG-13 Halloween special should do just fine.