Movie Review: The Void (2016)

Synopsis: Sheriff Deputy Daniel Carter comes across a blood-soaked man on a deserted country road and takes him to a nearby hospital. While there, he is forced to shoot a nurse when she attacks him with a pair of scissors and, a short-time later, the hospital is surrounded by a group of robed figures armed with knives. Unable to escape or call for help, Carter discovers another problem, the deceased are coming back to life and turning into tentacled creatures.

Who's in it? The movie stars Aaron Poole, Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, Ellen Wong, Daniel Fathers and Mik Byskov.


Review: My wife was in the mood for a horror movie last night and, as I made dinner, scrolled through Netflix in search of one. She originally picked out another film but, while waiting, decided the preview for this movie, while a bit incomplete, looked a little better and we wound up watching it.

As it turns out, this movie did prove to have a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it just didn't quite live up to that potential, at least in my opinion.

I think my biggest problem with this movie is it tries to do too much. If the movie would have kept things simple by focusing just on the creatures inside the hospital (which were very similar to the monster in The Thing), I probably would have enjoyed it. Or, if the movie would have just focused on the cult outside, even that likely would have been fun to watch. Trying to combine the two things, along with a story about an evil doctor who is trying to cheat death, wound up being a bit of an overkill and, by the end, was becoming more complicated than it needed to be, especially at the very end of the movie, which just seemed to drag on.

I'm also still really confused about the reasons why Carter (Poole) and the rest of the people in the hospital couldn't just try to escape, especially since he seemed to have plenty of time to get to his car to retrieve his gun (meaning he probably could have driven it up to the hospital door, had people hop then drove off before the cult got close enough to stop him).

Plus, while the movie sort of hints their issue is a wide-spread problem, especially with the way the radio and TV signals kept cutting out, I'm not sure it really did a good job explaining just how that was the case. At least from the evidence given at the end, it felt as though this was a relatively isolated thing rather than something that would have needed to have been on the same scale as an alien invasion or zombie apocalypse.

As a result of this, while my wife and I were intrigued enough early on to keep watching the film, we did admittedly start losing interest about three-quarters of the way through it and only finished watching it in the hopes it would redeem itself. Unfortunately, at least in our eyes, it didn't.

Final Opinion: The movie starts out OK. But, as I mentioned, it tries to do too much and the over-complicated plot does lessen its overall impact as a horror film.

My Grade: C

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