Late at night, on a deserted road outside of town, Sheriff Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) comes across a wounded man stumbling out of the woods.
The lawman rushes the injured man to the nearest hospital, a fire-damaged building on the point of closure, operated by a skeleton staff, including the sheriff's estranged wife, Allison (Kathleen Munroe).
Within moments of their arrival - and a nurse going insane - the dilapidated hospital is besieged by knife-wielding, sheet-wearing, cultists.
From there
The Void is a non-stop, violent, gore-splattered, thrill-ride through Lovecraft country by way of
Assault On Precinct 13,
The Thing and
Hellraiser.
This is a film - whose plot unfolds over a single night - that just doesn't let up. The action kicks off from the opening scene, backstories are sketched in with deft brevity, and the viewers find themselves sucked into the absorbing, claustrophobic, horror.
Malleable architecture, hallucinations, and shapeshifting, tentacled, monsters are just part of the sanity-assaulting fun that the writing-directing team of Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie bombard the audience with.
And it's probably worth drawing attention to a couple of extended scenes that feature bright, rapidly flashing lights that could affect people susceptible to such light shows.
There's a strong flavour of vintage '80s horror here (
but delivered with ichor-dripping 21st Century practical effects) that should satisfy any fan of HP Lovecraft's cosmic horror who tends to find the best cinematic realisations of his themes come in films not directly based on his stories (
such as the aforementioned The Thing, In The Mouth Of Madness, Event Horizon etc).
It would be a gross exaggeration to say
The Void is wholly original, but the diverse recipe of influences tap into so many of my favourite movies, sub-genres, and ideas of what makes good horror, that I embraced it all the more warmly.
In fact there was a part of me that couldn't help wondering if this script was lifted from a game of
Call Of Cthulhu, with a amount of pointless gunplay, fire-axe-swinging, and pulp novel machismo in the face of monstrosities not meant for the eyes of man.
