The Damned, A.K.A. Gallows Hill (2013)
Directed by Víctor García
Written by Richard D’Ovidio, David Higgins
Produced by Peter Block, Andrea Chung, David Higgins, Richard D’Ovidio, Cristina Villar, Mauricio Ardila, Julián Giraldo
Starring Peter Facinelli, Sophia Myles, Nathalia Ramos, Sebastian Martínez, Carolina Guerra, Juan Pablo Gamboa, Gustavo Angarita, Julieta Salazar
Preteen girls might be rattled by this hackneyed horror’s witching-by-numbers, as drippy and dreary a contribution to the genre as any in the past decade. En route from Bogotá to Medellín, a flash flood and their everyday idiocy strand a photographer (Facinelli) and his fiancée (Myles), opportunistic sister-in-law (Guerra), irksome daughter (Ramos), and her boyfriend (Martínez) in Colombian backcountry, where they find shelter from an unceasing downpour in a hotel that’s been shuttered for nearly thirty-five years. Against warnings from its aged proprietor (Angarita), that aforementioned stupidity motivates them to free from his basement a suspiciously imprisoned girl (Salazar), along with the dead witch who’s possessed and preserved her. Despite a few bright ideas invested in D’Ovidio’s story and Asdrúbal Medina’s fastidiously fine production design, any hope for a single scare’s smothered by syrupy reminiscence, unconvincing CG, a sequence of exhausted cliches and Frederik Wiedmann’s hoary score, which reliably disturbs any emerging trace of spooky mood. Facinelli’s blandly adequate as a milksop who’s as senselessly unprepared for action as the rest of his party, and so a fit lead subject to García’s able, unremarkable direction. Were Ramos less obnoxious, and D’Ovidio’s and Higgins’ dialogue not so bathetic, this might’ve been mediocre.
Instead, watch either version of The Old Dark House.
Execrable: The Damned
