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Malevolence
2004
Directed by: Stevan Mena
Written by: Stevan Mena

Starring:
Samantha Dark - Samantha Harrison
R. Brandon Johnson - Julian
Heather Magee - Marylin
Richard Glover - Kurt
Courtney Bertolone - Courtney Harrison

Director Stevan Mena has put together a nice bit of throw-back horror with Malevolence. It’s a bit of an odd one to categorize and although we don’t generally pigeonhole movies, in reviews we try to find a basis for description and/or comparison etc. Many times the ones that defy categorization turn out to be our favorites and Malevolence has a bit of a split personality that works for it. There is a duality that is slightly reminiscent of From Dusk til Dawn, unfortunately without the budget to pay for enough established acting.

I realize that when someone shells out $10 to see a movie, they don’t care what the budget was or whether the filmmaker faced obstacles along the way. They just care whether it’s a good movie. But I’m going to introduce a few of the elements into this conversation anyway. Mena had about $200k to film this with, and with that he put together one helluva fun horror flick. First up, it doesn’t laugh at itself, it’s not about ‘look how fucking ironic we can be’ – it’s a straight-forward horror movie. Granted, it starts out as a bit of a heist/suspense sort of thing (after the prologue establishing the horror coming up later) but the robbery set up stuff is pretty short. Probably coulda been shorter but Mena’s establishing characterization so no big deal.

After about 15 to 20 minutes in, it’s just full-on horror. And did I mention my favorite part yet…there are no damn jokes! If nothing else, the movie’s worth watching for that alone. I could not be more tired of lame, pop culture-driven, dated-within-one-week jokes in the latest big budget horror movies.

We’ve actually gone round and round over this movie. Overall, you can poke a bunch of holes in it. But when we would debate the individual points, we found we liked more than we poked at with the movie-poking stick.

The bad guy was creepy, the score was great (probably because it reminded us of other old horror movies but who cares, we liked it), the suspense built up nicely, we couldn’t always predict which way it was going to go (although we could a little more than we would’ve liked) and we jumped like school kids at some parts.

As we mentioned before, the acting is uneven. Several main characters work really well but not all of them. The only other drawbacks were a handful of those moments where you went ‘bullshit he would do that’ but not so many that they killed the credibility.

Somehow there’s still something about Malevolence that works for us. That certain horror 'je ne sais quois.' We definitely wouldn’t mind seeing someone give Mena a real budget to see what he could do.

[Out of a possible four Bloodshot Eyeballs.]

Malevolence