SIREN (2016)

Studio:       Chiller Films
Director:    Gregg Bishop
Writer:       Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski
Producer:  Gary Binkow, Jude S. Walko, Brad Miska
Stars:     Chase Williamson, Hannah Fierman, Justin Welborn, Hayes Mercure, Michael Aaron Milligan, Randy McDowell, Brittany Hall, Lindsey Garrett, William Mark McCullough

Review Score:

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Summary:

A bachelor accidentally unleashes a seductive creature confined inside a mysterious underground occult club.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Mr. Nyx, proprietor of underground occult club 50 North/40 West, and Sheriff Boone investigate a church where a cult was slaughtered after summoning the young siren Lilith. Lily kills Sheriff Boone. Nyx captures the creature by placing a binding bracelet on her ankle.

Eva says goodbye to her fiancé Jonah as he departs for a bachelor party with his brother Mac, best friend Rand Wilson, and Elliott Duncan. At a strip club in Garden City, Mac meets a mysterious man who tells him about a secret underground club that fulfills wild desires.

The four friends get high on mushrooms and follow the man to a remote mansion where the 50 North/40 West club is hidden. After they see several of the club’s strange sights, Mr. Nyx appears and escorts the quartet to a private room.

Nyx sends Jonah alone into a hallway where Jonah finds Lily confined to a small room. Through the door’s glass window, Lily sings a strange song that entrances Jonah.

As payment for Jonah’s unique experience, Nyx asks that the other three men give him the fondest memories of their mothers. Bewildered, the trio agrees. Nyx has Mac, Rand, and Elliott look down and then tells them they are paid in full. Later, the three men notice that odd tattoos now appear on the backs of their necks. The club’s bartender serves Elliott a drink with a live leech and soon after, Elliott begins acting paranoid and remorseful for a murder he didn’t commit.

While Mac and Elliott wait outside with the car running, Jonah enlists Rand to help him free Lily. A pair of brother bouncers attempts to stop the rescue. As one of the bouncers fights Rand, Lily rushes Jonah into a bathroom and unlocks her ankle restraint with keys stolen from the bouncer. Jonah watches in horror as Lily sprouts a tail and devours one of the bouncers.

Jonah and Rand make it outside to Mac’s car. Other club patrons also flee the house in panic as Lily goes on a rampage.

Lily flies after Mac’s car and abducts Elliott through the passenger side window. Mac crashes the car. Rand is run over while trying to flag an approaching vehicle. The vehicle turns out to be carrying Nyx and the other bouncer, Barry, who capture Rand as Jonah and Mac flee into the forest.

Jonah realizes that Lily wants him specifically. He and Mac make it to a diner and tell their story to police officers O’Brien and Collins. However, the cops have the strange tattoos on their necks and report finding the two men directly to Nyx.

Upset over losing Lily, Nyx interrogates Rand and has Barry torture him.

Lily arrives at the diner and seduces the officer holding Jonah with her song. She then kills both policemen. In full creature form, Lily professes her attraction to Jonah by saying, “I like you.” Mac sees Lily fly away with Jonah. Lily takes Jonah to a field where she sings her song and has sex with him.

Nyx has the bartender remove a sentient leech from her head that she uses to extract the torture experience from Rand’s neck. Nyx then instructs the bartender to find Jonah and make him ingest the worm.

Jonah leaves Lily sleeping on the ground and makes it back to his hotel room on foot. There, he is confronted by the bartender, who forces him to drink the worm and relive Rand’s pain. The bartender tells Jonah that Nyx wants Jonah to bring him Lily in exchange for releasing Rand.

Jonah meets Nyx at the church where Nyx first found Lily. Nyx gives Jonah the binding bracelet and tells him he is the only person who can get close enough to recapture Lily.

Lily comes to the church and starts attacking robed cultists. Jonah apologizes for leading her into Nyx’s trap and seemingly makes an agreement for the two of them to go their separate ways. Lily nods and bolts for the cellar with Barry in pursuit. Jonah discards the binding ring.

Nyx attacks Jonah. Mac arrives at the church and beats Nyx off of Jonah. However, Nyx recovers and cuts Mac’s throat. Nyx begins approaching Jonah as Jonah attempts to free Rand.

Having killed Barry, Lily returns to the altar and sings her song to entrance Nyx. She then thrusts the tip of her tail through Nyx’s head, killing him.

Lily kisses Jonah before flying away. Jonah escapes the church with Rand and returns home to Eva.

On their wedding anniversary one year later, Jonah briefly thinks he hears Lily’s call before having sex with Eva. Afterward, Jonah goes downstairs and finds Eva sleeping on the couch. Jonah realizes that the woman he actually slept with was Lily.

Lily comes downstairs. Jonah pleads with her to leave. Eva wakes and Lily prepares to attack. Jonah agrees to go with Lily if she spares Eva. Eva screams as she watches Lily fly into the sky with her husband.

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Review:

A case can be made that of the centerpiece segments in “found footage” anthology “V/H/S” (review here), “Amateur Night” seems least ripe for a full-length expansion.  David Bruckner and Nicholas Tecosky’s “Tales from the Crypt”-style short of three douchey dudes and their ill-fated stab at sleazy sex maybe has wiggle room to fluff its key character’s mythology.  But already overlong at 20 minutes, its stretched exposition of repugnant barfly behavior and belabored beast reveal don’t scream that significant story depth was left on the table.  Someone thought we needed a 90-minute rip of obnoxious raunchiness leading to a one-time payoff of “she’s actually a creature!” carnage?

Not exactly.  Much like writer Eric Heisserer did by turning the two-minute short “Lights Out” into an unexpectedly robust feature screenplay (review here), scripters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski take “Amateur Night’s” wafer-thin premise and inventively inject character, complexity, and creativity for surprisingly full-bodied fiction with follow-up film “SiREN” (the title is intentionally styled with capital letters save a lowercase ‘i’).

Director Gregg Bishop’s calculating cinematic eye then sprightly moves momentum from beat to beat through smart staging and snappy spacing.  Puff in personality from Chase Williamson as the kind-hearted hero and Justin Welborn as his cold-blooded foil, and “SiREN” comes out ahead with meatier material than one might think possible given the shallow source short.

You don’t need to see or to revisit “V/H/S,” which is for the best, to get the gist of “SiREN.”  The film is neither prequel, sequel, nor remake of “Amateur Night,” though parent and child share a setup and effectively take place in the same space.

Gone is the “found footage” format.  Also gone is “Amateur Night’s” trio of misogynist miscreants, whom “SiREN” thankfully exchanges for the infinitely more tolerable quartet of Jonah, his brother, and two bachelor partying pals.  This foursome is harmlessly goofy about sending Jonah’s singlehood out in style, making their quips, comments, and jabs at each other legitimately laugh-out-loud funny instead of boorishly bothersome.

The boys end up at 50 North/40 West, a mysterious club seemingly designed by Clive Barker in collaboration with Saturday Night Live’s Stefon.  Hallways built on supernatural substance of sin, sorrow, and sex find themselves filled with seductive strippers, snake-haired bartenders, and burly bouncers wearing “Eyes Wide Shut” masks.  Jonah and company aren’t quite sure if they’re still tripping on shrooms swallowed earlier or if they’ve somehow stepped into an occult underworld located somewhere between “Hostel” and “Hellraiser.”

Proprietor Mr. Nyx presents an unusual proposition.  For the price of a few fond memories from his friends’ minds, Jonah can have a unique encounter with Lily, a strange beauty as eerily awkward as she is enchantingly exotic.  Jonah’s bewildered buddies get branded with unusual marks and Jonah gets seduced by a song Lily sings from the other side of a door.

Jonah comes out of his trance and spots the lock on Lily’s room.  Convinced Mr. Nyx is keeping her captive, Jonah gets his best friend Rand to help mount a rescue while Mac and Elliott gas the getaway car outside.  Only after breaking her out do Jonah and Rand discover Lily is no mere mortal woman.  She is a confused creature determined to make Jonah her mate.  And she will mutate into a monster to scorch any earth standing in her way.  As if Lily isn’t trouble enough, there’s also the alarming matter of Mr. Nyx, who has his own sinister ways of retrieving what he wants from Jonah.

“SiREN” gets a great deal of gas from its engaging first act.  Situational silliness is organically amusing without forcing anything to be funny.  The feeling is far from a strict horror/comedy classification, instead functioning as a natural way to disarm the viewer while giving characters a humorous halo establishing them as endearing.  Or endearing enough that an hour in their company isn’t terribly torturous.

Once the men make it inside the underground club, the mood ramps quickly from charmingly offbeat to disturbingly weird.  The shift is so slick that a veil of dread settles in slowly.  Like Jonah’s group, you want to see all the strange secrets this place hides, yet are afraid a suddenly pulled rug could reveal your eyes are in over their heads.  Of all the oddities introduced in this exposition, Lily actually takes a backseat to the more absorbing presence of Mr. Nyx and his crazy cavalcade of freaky creeps.

“SiREN” buckles a bit on the backside when the script starts trading in quick wit dialogue and characterization for a frantic string of herky-jerky action.  The front end is heavy on elements adding intrigue to the film’s lore and environment.  The latter half then loses a lot of that identity by repeating scene after scene of chase, capture, kill, and chase again.

Nevertheless, Bishop and his cast manage to tighten such strings before they get too loose by keeping energy high, and the film feeds from that enthusiasm.  “SiREN” may mire itself in repetitive sequences when it doesn’t know how else to advance the plot, though once full speed peaks, the pace at least never slows down to idle.

“SiREN” also feels the bite of its budget with some CGI effects stepping a toe outside their scope.  (The bartender’s memory leech should be one worm instead of a full head of wonkily wiggling Medusa hair.)  Yet the overall crispness of the film eclipses even a few spots of too-dark cinematography.  “SiREN” is probably the best looking production from Chiller Films to date, and their most consistently entertaining movie too.  “SiREN” might skip on a few ice patches here and there.  But it lands in a sweet spot of mildly wild monster movie with a dash of otherworldly appeal tailored terrifically for a fright night tinged with fun.

Review Score:  75

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