In short: Believers (2007)

Paramedics and buddies David (Johnny Messner) and Victor (Jon Huertas) follow a call to some godforsaken country garage. There, they are trying to save the life of a badly wounded woman (Deanna Russo) who just escaped from what looks very much like a cult with her little daughter. Before they can do much, a trio of armed men arrive and take everyone prisoner, while the gas station attendant proceeds to hide the ambulance.

The captives are taken to an industrial looking compound. There, they will eventually learn they are now in the hands of a group of former scientists, mathematicians, and so on, who have come to believe the world is going to be ending soon after discovering some kind of god formula. Obviously, the group will be the only ones to transcend the end and continue humanity afterwards, but there are some things they have to do first. Among them, either convert or kill any non-believers who came into contact with them. apparently, though the film stays vague about this. All of this is your standard UFO death cult business, of course, but there seems to be something genuinely strange going with the paramedics’ captors that might suggest there’s some truth about what the group’s leader, known as The Teacher (Daniel Benzali), says.

Like his one time creative partner Eduardo Sánchez, The Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick didn’t have a lot of luck with the projects he did after starting his career with an all-time classic horror movie. Like in the case of Sánchez, some of his movies really deserve better than they got, financially, commercially and critically. Case in point – at least for me – is what may very well be the best UFO death cult movie ever made, a direct-to-video affair effectively enough directed and cleverly enough written it is never all that difficult to ignore its budgetary limitations.

And those limitations are really very limited indeed, leading to a film that mostly takes place in the same shitty warehouse or warehouse-looking set all cheap movies of this era took place in, with production values that sometimes look as if the filmmaker had to fight for every scribble of weird formula on a toilet wall. Yet still, it works: there’s genuine tension to the proceedings, as well as a pervading feeling of true Weirdness, as if there truly is some kind of revelation of a horrible truth lurking behind the ugly and shoddy looking surroundings. In fact, the way Myrick (and DP Andrew Huebscher) use and shoot the grottily quotidian locations they can afford only emphasises the genuine feeling of strangeness of the narrative by virtue of contrast.

All of which is a bit of a wonder in a film that by all rights should have ended up as just your typical late 00s warehouse-bound horror movie.