Cryptic Plasm (2015)

David Gates (Joe Olson) and his camera operator buddy Brian O’Reilly (the film’s auteur Brian Paulin) are filming cryptozoological investigations for a rather shady guy who promises David the moon, though doesn’t actually publish the footage the two shoot.

After an experience in an empty town that has supposedly been influenced by a wormhole – or, as we the audience know, whatever it brought with it - that leaves particularly David shaken, the money guy commands them to shoot an exorcism, despite this not being David’s area of expertise.

During the exorcism, things go very wrong indeed, and soon demonic and cosmic influences are dragging various bodies apart.

I’m generally not the greatest fan of nor expert on underground gore style horror, so I’m somewhat surprised at finding myself delving quite vigorously into the filmography of New England indie gore auteur Brian Paulin. Though this certainly helps, it’s not only that I can’t help but admire the drive of someone who – together with recurring collaborators – has been making movies on home budgets since the early 90s, it’s that Paulin’s films show genuine power and invention.

Sure, the acting often isn’t terribly great, but it’s also earnest and serious in ways that keeps it from being a source of mockery, and has generally grown more sure over the years. And yes, on the visual side of the craft, the filmmaking is often pretty damn rough, yet it is rough in exactly the kind of way films that are all about mental and bodily transformations, rot and the many improbable and therefore awesome ways human flesh might be destroyed, transformed and turned into gloop, goo, and other g-words that surely must exist, should be. Even better, Paulin, in film after film, does come up with new and grotesque shapes to form his physical – no CG here, that’s for sure – material into forms I haven’t seen before. This way, the gore isn’t just an incredibly impressive demonstration of what you can make out of cheap materials but also feels individual and personal to Paulin’s imagination.

Cryptic Plasm, which was initially planned to be a web serial, shows the filmmaker at a point in his career where he’s clearly grown extremely sure of his craft, and so can add elements of POV horror to his arsenal that fit his general visual approach nicely and thicken the general thick, if certainly never pleasant, mood of proceedings further. The film’s pacing will probably be a bit leisurely at the beginning for some tastes, but this very specific vision of cosmic horror as gore freakout can use a bit of room to breathe before it truly gets going. And once it does, there’s no stopping until the entire cast has been turned into a mess of gloop, slime, blood and pus in ways that can make one more than a little queasy, in the best possible way.