The Shrine – VOD Review

One of the most frustrating elements about being a horror fan and getting older is that it gets harder and harder for a film to genuinely scare me. When I reminisce about my younger days, there were a number of scary offerings that got under my skin and stayed there. Granted, as a kid, it did not take a whole lot to get me to jump out of my seat, but there was cinema that was simply unnerving. To this day I try my best to not watch them with the lights out because they have all aged like fine wine and still give me goosebumps.

Carrie, The Exorcist, The Changeling, Don’t Look Now, and The Shining have stood the test of time by keeping the horror predominantly off-screen and playing with man’s inner phobia of the unknown. It is hard to pull of correctly, as evidenced by the drought that has set in the last ten years or so.

As Dan Aykroyd said in Twilight Zone: The Movie, “Do wanna see something really scary?” Aside from Kairo [Pulse] and Ju-On [The Grudge], I cannot recall the last time a movie successfully achieved that conquest for most of the film’s running time. Maybe it is because a good portion of today’s filmmakers feel the need to throw a jolt scare every two seconds to the attention-span challenged filmgoers, therefore, losing any chance of extracting any suspense or tension. Things are bound to change, right? As a die-hard fan you never lose hope, then, out of nowhere, you get blindsided by an independent picture that is the fingernails scratching down a chalkboard that the fright scene so needed.

After an young man disappears in Europe, a trio of journalists search for him deep into the heart of Alvaina, a Polish village where human sacrifices are part of the tradition of a local cult who bring new meaning to the phrase hammer time. Carmen [Cindy Sampson] makes her way into a mysterious mist to look for her friend Sara [Meghan Heffern], who was bold enough to volunteer to step foot into the fog first as the friends sensed this was the pathway to finding the missing American. Carmen comes face-to-face with a demonic statue that stands tall and idle, yet deadly, as the Stonehenge-esque Pazuzu holds a power that the sect will kill to keep under wraps. The murderous monks have a deadly practice of taking a sharp cloak and placing it above the face of a victim and taking a downward swing to cleanse the souls of those who have stared into the eyes of pure evil.

At first glance, The Shrine looks like a knock-off of the survival horror entries Turistas and Hostel, but upon further inspection, the Jon Knautz directed film is more akin to the Dreamworks adaption of Scott Smith’s novel, The Ruins. For those of you still recovering from the agony of seeing Nic Cage retool The Wicker Man ["Not the bees!"] can come out of hiding because The Shrine brings back the old school religious decor of Robin Hardy’s classic and adds the atmospheric spunk of a Hammer flick. The huge mask that got pounded into the face of Barbara Steele in Black Sunday has been homaged in everything from Lord of Illusions to Sleepy Hollow, but they were mere footnotes in the basic structure of the story, whereas, with The Shrine, it serves as a divine contraption that is not that dissimilar from the instrument used in Mario Bava’s 1960 forerunner.

Low budget skills are strong with this Brookstreet Films production as it goes a long way in showing that there is more to the genre than remakes and sequels. Not only is it one of the most frightening movies of the last decade; The Shrine is a masterpiece that brings fear back to the horror genre.

Rating: