“CULT” (2007)

Starring: Rachel Miner, Taryn Manning, Myke Michaels, Robert Berson, Courtney Fine & Fiona Horne
Written by Stephen Fromkin (story), Joe Knee (story) & Benjamin Oren (story/screenplay)
Directed by Joe Knee
Maverick Entertainment

Polly Staffle Rating: **

Bad or cheesy special effects are fine. Neither kills a low budget horror film in my eyes. A bad or sloppy story, on the other hand, can do irreversible damage to my movie-watching experience. That’s just what Joe Knee’s super natural film “Cult” does.

With its not-so-special effects, it is obvious “Cult” is a low-end, straight-to-DVD movie; despite that, there are so many elements in place that could have made it a treasured little gem. There’s a solid cast with Rachel Miner (“Bully”) leading the pack and Taryn Manning (“Hustle & Flow”) bringing up the rear. There’s a great score by Thanh Tran (“Ghost Rider”) that is reminiscent of music from “The Exorcist.” Early on the film hints at exploring the theme of “one man’s cult is another man’s religion,” but besides uttering that phrase, there is no mention of the sort again. There’s an interesting back story with a woman named Kwan Yin that died a horrible death, giving the film a vibe like “The Grudge.” Pregnant out of wedlock, Kwan was stabbed in the stomach and had her eyes gouged out to kill her soul. As Kwan Yin lay dying, she placed a curse on a jade amulet she was wearing. Since then the amulet, which looks like a mood pendant, played a key role in a mostly female cult that ended deadly.

However, “Cult” doesn’t do much with any of these good elements. For starters, the story is set in the overused world of college students meddling in things they shouldn’t. Written by Benjamin Oren - a contributing writer to “The Andy Milonakis Show” - “Cult” finds a group of students doing a research paper on a local temple and the sect that committed mass suicide there. It’s not a good idea, the professor warns, but they do it anyway. Soon secrets buried in one of the students’ past surface and just about everybody ends up dead.

If at least 10 other movies come to mind when you read that summary then you understand part of the problem. Sure, some decent movies have been made using this formula, but if your start is an overused idea that at best has led to “Urban Legend” and “The Curse of Lizzie Borden,” you’ve got to work extra hard to win your audience over. What complicates things is the screenplay sets up no rules. We are told in the opener that the amulet carries special powers, but we are never told what it is capable of. Basically, the necklace makes people kill themselves and takes their souls. If it is so deadly, shouldn’t it be under a lock and key with someone safe guarding it 24 hours a day? Well, it’s just on a statue waiting for some idiot to snatch it, so one of the film’s genius college students - a male cheerleader - does just that and then all hell breaks loose.

Soon it seems there are multiple amulets that all have lives of their own. But that’s only because we’ve never been informed of the stupid thing’s power. A cool entity of movies is you can get away with just about anything. Viewers want to be entertained, so we suspend our disbelief. You can give a guy the ability to change his past by reading his journal, but he can’t just have this power out of nowhere. Audiences have to be told early on or have the ability revealed as the character figures it out and we will give in to it. But “Cult” doesn’t explain how the amulet makes people kill themselves or what evil it does once it has collected enough souls or how it jumps from place to place and person to person. One character can be wearing the amulet in one scene; in the next someone else is finding it in their dirty underwear pile, and in the next scene it’s at the coffee shop having a tall latte and engaged in a conversation about the meaning of life. Okay, so I am exaggerating a bit here. You still get my point. People pick up the amulet, put it down, throw it about and the next thing you know, it has jumped into someone’s pocket and around their neck and then they are naked in a bathroom stall stabbing their eyes out.

The other thing I didn’t like about this movie is how it starts out strong and just slowly stumbles its away to the end. There is absolutely no suspense, and any ulterior motives are dead giveaways. The opener gives us background on Kwan Yin and I was digging it. Then before the credits, we see the massacre at the temple. At this point I still was engaged, thinking this was going to be a pretty good little film. Then we meet our cast and the film settles down, like all movies do, but it never really picks up much speed.

However, what I did like about “Cult” was the strong cast, which was far too good for this film. Especially, Rachel Miner, who plays the lead Mindy. She’s what makes the film watchable and is so out of place a number of times. There are scenes between Mindy and her father that are just horribly bad. While Miner is giving A-list caliber acting, I’m completely taken out of the story by the father, who seems stuck in a really bad movie. He’s not the only bad acting in this film, he’s just the worst. I never saw Miner as the type of actress that could do horror before, but now I’m convinced. The good news is she appears to be sticking with the genre for a bit as the post-apocalyptic cannibal film “Tooth & Nail” with Michael Madsen, the After Dark Horror Fest movie “Penny Dreadful” with Michael Berryman and the K.C. Bascombe-directed “Hide” are places we’ll be seeing her next.

Overall, Joe Knee’s film isn’t a complete waste of time, it just isn’t that original and doesn’t fully take advantage of the good elements it has. In the end, “Cult” is a run-of-the-mill horror film that is good enough to kill an hour and a half, but that’s about it. Bottom line, I’d recommend this as a rental, but it’s nothing to stab your eyes out over if it happens to be all checked out.

- CCF, March 2007