COWPOKE BROTHERS FIND THEMSELVES IN A WITCHY SITUATION
★★☆☆☆ (Don’t Bother)
Director: Aaron B. Koontz
2020
There’s a moment in The Pale Door that delivers a subtle kick of dread. After a gang of outlaws stop a train supposedly holding a safe filled with gold, they discover a swath of Pinkerton employees guarding one item: a wooden box that is rocking back and forth. The Pinkerton guards would rather die than give up the box’s secret, making the outlaws somewhat anxious. They’re not the only ones. This is a killer scene that evokes the slow burn of a noonday gun battle and the sound of a footstep in a dark house. It’s everything you’re looking for in a horror film.
This is, unfortunately, the only time this western horror movie understands itself. The title The Pale Door, taken from a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, hints at the greatness that this movie aimed for but didn’t come close to capturing.
The Pale Door starts out with promise. One night, during a thunderstorm, two young brothers are forced out of their rural farmhouse by men who want the family dead. By the end of the scene, they are orphaned and their love for one another is firmly established. Duncan, the oldest, is patient with Jake as he comforts him during the storm and almost sacrifices himself so the youngest can escape. After a time lapse, we find out how the brothers have coped with their loss and how far apart their paths have split. Duncan (Zachary Knighton) has become the leader of a gang and a Most Wanted outlaw while his little brother Jake (Devin Druid) is helping a bartender so he can make some honest money to buy back the old family farm. The movie uses such a heavy hand showing us that Jake is a virginal angel while Duncan is a growling six-shooter that I half expected a halo to pop over Jake’s head and devil horns to appear on Duncan’s. We get it. I promise.
The introduction to Duncan’s rough gang of thieves is slap-sticky, an example of abrupt tone changes throughout. Then a gang member dies in the requisite duel and his death unfolds as if we are supposed to have some sort of emotional connection to this character we never met. The bond between the brothers is what is strong here, and Devin Druid does an excellent job of disappearing into the straight-edge, sensitive brother who still sees the good in his older one. Druid as the youthful Jake is casting perfection. Our feelings while watching The Pale Door are for him only.
Being one man down means innocent Jake is joining these ruffians on their next heist, the aforementioned train robbery gone wrong. Once the box is opened, our gang winds up in a ghost town of women witches hellbent on revenge against men. During the expected melee, hook-nosed crones crawl on the ceiling (an effectively spooky image) but this is where all the creativity came to a stand still; everything after Act I is fairly predictable. The witch battle is just the director throwing witches around so these cowboys can shoot at them. The men literally walk around in the dark and shoot these spawns of the devil hiding behind trees. The budget allowed for some neat effects, but we don’t go far beyond the very small sets, making the movie feel claustrophobic.
And The Pale Door doesn’t know what to do with these women as they come off as feminists, victims, and villains. That brings me to another point. None of this would have happened if the mysterious box had reached its intended target: the famous Mather family.
Cotton Mather is one of the most evil Americans who ever lived. I don’t care about his scientific work or his connections; he was a misogynistic, murderous, slave-owning monster. And in this movie he’s the…hero? Yes. As he predicted, the witches wind up being murderous spell casters, which means Cotton Mather is a good guy in The Pale Door. It’s disgusting and offensive and I’m not at all sure anyone did enough research on him before writing this into the script.
“AS HE PREDICTED, THE WITCHES WIND UP BEING MURDEROUS SPELL CASTERS, WHICH MEANS COTTON MATHER IS A GOOD GUY IN THE PALE DOOR.”
There are multiple writers for this film and it shows. We have a writer who excelled at the more emotional scenes between brothers, one writer who would write 200 pages of exposition dialogue if you’d let them, and one writer who wants to give us the bloody body horror we crave. At least that’s my guess because we have three different films here—the comedy, the drama, and the low-budget Cronenberg. The meaningless conversations in the film hurt it more than anything. There is Mike Flanagan dialogue (a copious amount that elevates the project by making the audience change their minds about death and religion) and then there’s the mass dialogue in The Pale Door that seems to only exist to pad out the run time. Characters flap their gums and say nothing. The movie stretches out the “twist” at the end—a ho hum secret about the brother’s past—into what feels like a half-hour telenovela.
SPOILERS Then there’s the moment we desperately need dialogue. There should be a scene that gives us the stakes for young Jake, so that his decision to stay would have more weight. Instead, you’ll be left scratching your head. Are they bathing in his blood? Eating him? Having sex with him? I’ll never know. I want to also point out that Duncan’s decision to abandon Jake is so out of character for him, or anyone who loves their sibling, that I laughed and waved the movie off. Two of the writers forgot about all the hard work the one writer did when developing the brother’s bond.
The Pale Door might make western fans happy. Horror fans, not so much. Something wicked this way comes, but not really.
GENRES: Diverse Characters, Feminist-Friendly, LGBTQ+, Monster/Creature
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