Genre films — especially horror films — tend to let you do a lot with a little. If you can sell a novel idea with limited resources and a couple of good performances, you can get away with almost anything else. But that door swings both ways. All the personality in the world can’t make up for a botched execution or a boring central premise. Which brings us to Consumed, the new film by The Butcher Brothers, AKA Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores.
Beth (Courtney Halverson) and her husband Jay (Mark Famiglietti) are on a hiking/camping getaway to celebrate her cancer’s recent remission. Their lovely trip takes a rough turn rather quickly, though, as it turns out these woods are inhabited by some sort of scary monster that “steals peoples’ skin” and may or may not be the mythical Wendigo. When Jay is injured running away from the beast, he and his wife are rescued — maybe — by Quinn (Devon Sawa), a clearly deranged man who wears animal skins, lives in a hole in the ground, and has a serious vendetta against (and perhaps a connection with) the monster.
That’s a mostly promising setup, but Consumed falters in some crucial ways. First, while Halverson does what she can with the part, it mostly consists of just a bunch of running and shouting. The less said about Famiglietti the better, as Jay spends most of the movie stuck in Quinn’s shelter wondering what’s going on. Sawa has easily the flashiest part here, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before in countless other movies. Speaking of things you’ve seen before, the big set piece initially dealing with the monster and its powers features Beth running through the woods being chased by a snaking plume of black smoke that can apparently look like whomever it wants. It’s difficult to believe the filmmakers aren’t familiar with Lost, and impossible to think that at the very least someone else involved with this picture didn’t point out the preposterous resemblance. No matter what happens going forward, the air has been fully sucked out of the premise.
What’s left is an almost episodic back-and-forth between Beth and Quinn as she learns more about his relationship with the thing out there while trying to escape the woods, which are photographed gloomily and frequently in darkness. Some pretty solid last-minute creature effects finally threaten to break up the film’s narrative and visual monotony, but it’s far too little and definitely too late. Consumed core story is simply too shallow and its premise too generic, and so there’s nothing left for viewers to do for most of the movie’s runtime than to just watch it crumble in real time.
DIRECTOR: Mitchell Altieri; CAST: Devon Sawa, Courtney Halverson, Mark Famiglietti; DISTRIBUTOR: Brainstorm Media; IN THEATERS: August 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min.
