Handsome farming brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomón, giving off big Scoot McNairy energy) are minding their business one night when the sound of gunshots suddenly erupt out in the woods – and there will be a lot of “going to investigate”’ing happening in When Evil Lurks so it’s best if you get over being annoyed by that horror movie cliche right up front. Everybody is always “going to investigate” things they most assuredly should never go investigate, and it never works out well, and yet nobody learns. If Pedro and Jimmy had just sat their asses at home sipping their cerveza we all could’ve rested in peace!
Unfortunately the brothers go and the brothers investigate, and what they find starts off disgusting and only works its way up the barf dial from there. A body sliced clean down the middle leads them to a nearby farmstead, where a family has been hiding their dirty (and I do mean dirty) secret behind some blanket curtains in a back-room – their son has gone “rotten,” which is how people in this film’s world describe those possessed by demons. It seems to be a common enough occurrence in the world of this movie – the script refrains from spelling it out too hard but there are several vague references to religion being dead, and everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who’s had to deal with a devil in their midst.
“Rotten” is certainly the word for it though, since the possessed man resembles nothing less than a pouch of spider eggs splattered liberally with tar and bloodied yolks. He’s truly a marvel of grotesque design – the practical-effects in Where Evil Lurks are top-notch; you’ll wanna take a medley of Silkwood showers by the time this goopy baby’s come in for landing.
Slowly we learn a few more rules about this world we’re inhabiting – most importantly that you can’t shoot the “rotten” dead, because that will cause the evil inside of them to explode out like a virus, infecting everyone within reach. So Pedro and Jimmy and another neighbor get the super not bright idea to just load the “rotten” up in the back of their pick-up and drive it a few hundred miles away, where they will toss it into a ditch and drive off. Let this be a lesson, kids – you can’t ignore your problems or unload them on other people, especially when they’re hell-spawned pustule people out to swallow ya souls.
So that goes wrong, and before you know it the stench of possession is stinking up the land – Rugna wisely decides to keep us focused on the brothers and their immediate loved ones, but it’s pretty clear that this is a small apocalypse in the making. And so we follow Pedro as he goes to grab his kids from his estranged wife, which goes about as well as you can expect whenever an estranged husband pops up out of nowhere trying to snatch his kids. The film escalates from there into a series of madnesses spilling into one another, ratcheting up the tension and the body count, and letting it be known fast and ruthlessly that nobody is safe – pets and children and lovers of both of those things, beware!
The last half of When Evil Lurks gets a bit bogged down in over-explaining itself – it’d done a decent enough job up until then just telling us what we needed to know in the moment we needed it, so it’s a little disappointing when it starts spinning its wheels. Especially as a lot of the “rules” and “explanations” don’t entirely jive with what we’ve seen, or how our characters have behaved. But none of that is enough to entirely dilute the nasty power that When Evil Lurks drums up at its strongest – it stays on the right side of WTF just enough to WTF you up.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment