HALLOWED GROUND / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR:MILES DOLEAC / STARRING: MILES DOLEAC, SHERRI EAKIN, RITCHIE MONTGOMERY/ RELEASE DATE: JUNE 11TH (VOD)
Married couple Vera (Sheri Eakin) and Alice (Lindsay Anne Williams) venture to an isolated couples’ retreat in search of a way to work through Alice’s infidelities with an abusive photographer (Jeremy Sande). The retreat, built on native land and owned by Natives, shares a border with a hostile backwoods family who threaten to sacrifice any who stray onto their land.
One of the more exciting aspects of Miles Doleac’s Hallowed Ground was the idea of its leads being a gay couple, because even in 2019 representation of LGBTQIA people is nowhere near where it should be. Horror has a long history of equating gay communities with devious behaviour, with the over-sexualising of relationships between women being a particular issue. Doleac doesn’t quite hit exploitation territory, but his handling of the couple (their sexuality, gender, characterisation) comes across as leery, odd, and clearly male-written. In one scene the two women argue about who had it worse; the bisexual or the lesbian, in another they don’t seem as bothered as they should when Sande arrives and starts getting crazy abusive. It comes across as if Doleac thinks women should be more forgiving of men, and also like he doesn’t have very much time for gay women.
But then, on the other side of that, his villains are all caricatured as hyper-patriarchal types. Doleac’s own character, the head of the family cult, is an entitled asshole who treats his wife like a slave and drawls on about how the lesbian couple are morally repugnant. His redneck family are also, of course, descendants of confederate soldiers and use the family heirloom, a cavalry sword, to dispatch trespassers. There’s an element of the 2005 2001 Maniacs about this redneck affair.
Doleac’s social commentary is as disposable and weirdly twisted as 2001 Maniacs’ was, and like that jubilant remake, he does best in the short-term nastiness. The gore and violent moments are nicely put together and reveal he knows how to pull of his punch lines, be they torture sequences, fights, or stabbings. And his Satanic Southern Cult cut a cool silhouette through a visually flat film. But there’s always an underlying feel that the film is just kinda dull. At a two hour runtime, it’s amazing how much fat could be trimmed.
Moment to moment, there are some issues with character consistency and logic. There are multiple moments when the script feels irritatingly detached from what’s going on. Sande’s appearance doesn’t elicit the kind of response you might expect, turning up refusing to leave, screaming the women down, slapping one of them, and he gets a relatively chill response. By the end of the film, were honestly supposed to give a fuck about his demise.
It’s a strange mixed bag, wherein a group of unlikable characters do things that don’t make much sense and then the film ends. The slow pace only allows those moments to be revealed as stagey and awkward. Better editing might have given the film a more satisfying flow, but it would still be a while away from being a particularly satisfying journey.
Hallowed Ground overstays its welcome and doesn’t feel outrageously well-considered. Some components do fine, veteran performer Ritchie Montgomery and the gore, for instance, but for the most part it’s a boring, self-indulgent ride.
