Three Films Make A Post: They dared enter the Cave of Death to explore the secrets of hell!

The Unknown Terror (1957): This 50s outing by director Charles Marquis Warren tried to sell itself as the sort of horror and SF movie typical of the decade. In reality, the horror of shaving foam-based fungus monsters and a single surprisingly effective shambling foam zombie attack are relegated to the film’s final ten percent or thereabout. Before that, a viewer has to make their way through a full bingo card of colonialist adventure tropes. This sort of thing isn’t always pleasant to begin with (though better films of the genre are often pretty damn entertaining despite modern viewers’ looking askance at their politics), but combined with leaden pacing and a dry and humourless presentation, suffering through it to get to the foam monsters is simply not worth it.

Double Walker (2021): As much of our time as Unknown Terror was of its own, this very low budget indie horror piece directed by Colin West can be pretty magical. At least if you’re in the mood for a slow film that tends to obscure its backstory and timeline to evoke the feeling of slightly distanced confusion its ghost protagonist (pretty wonderfully played by Sylvie Mix, who was also involved in the plotting) has in the audience.

Often, the film creates a peculiar dreamlike mood through simple devices, using ambiguity and a bit of conscious obscurity to add to the effect. Sometimes, it goes a bit far in this direction, in the way debut features often do.

Skyman (2019): With this movie, Blair Witch co-director Daniel Myrick returns to the found footage well once more, this time in form of a fake documentary about Carl Merryweather (Michael Selle) who says he met an alien when he was a little boy, and has been a bit different ever since.

The film works best when the whole aliens and conspiracy angle takes a backseat in favour of somewhat light-handed but often well-observed scenes that portray the not always easy but loving relationship between Carl and his sister Gina (Nicolette Sweeney) and Carl’s only friend Marcus (Faleolo Alailima). This portrayal of loving and trying to protect a loved one with mental illness (which Carl is to the rest of the world), and how difficult difference can be to navigate for the person who is different as well as those around him is the meat of the movie. The film finds a note of compassion and understanding without lacking humour and without falling into mawkishness.

Too bad the horror movie abduction stuff is of as little interest as it is, leaving the whole affair somewhat lopsided, though never without interest.

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.