Director Christian Alvart made the dark, foreboding German variation on SE7EN, ANTIBODIES, and his experience in Hollywood seems pretty typical. Imported on the strength of a distinctive, disturbing homegrown movie, he was given a very streamlined, generic movie with which to make his American debut. A movie that sat on the shelf so long that its release in the UK and US actually precedes that of his NEXT movie, space-horror flick PANDORUM.
CASE 39 is a workmanlike, half-way diverting occult chiller in the 70’s Hollywood OMEN / EXORCIST mould that surprises with its lack of genuine menace, especially given ANTIBODIES was such a genuinely sinister piece of work. That, and the unwelcome presence of unconvincing, unsympathetic leading lady Renee Zellwegger, hamper what could have been an interesting addition to the Bad Seed sub-genre.
Things look promising at the outset, with an impressively grim opening stretch in which apparently crazed parents Callum Keith Rennie and Kerry O’Malley shove their 10 year old daughter (SILENT HILL’s Jodelle Ferland) into a large gas over for reasons unclear. She’s rescued in the nick of time, but it’s not often that a Hollywood star vehicle opens with a kid being hurled into a deadly kitchen appliance…and even less often that said scene is followed by some off-camera nastiness in which a 10 year old boy kills his parents with a tyre-iron.
Social worker Zellwegger ill-advisedly takes the strange kid under her wing after this horrifying near-death experience, but becomes gradually aware, in a plodding fashion (c.f. Greg Peck in THE OMEN or Vera Farmiga in this summer’s ORPHAN), that the girl is evil incarnate and capable of instigating horrible deaths (relating to the worst fears of the chosen victim) simply via a phone call.
The weirdly unappealing Zellwegger is the weakest link in an interesting cast of strong supporting actors that include a wholly wasted Ian McShane in a functional role as a doomed veteran cop and Bradley Cooper as a psychologist who is present only to perish in an elaborate bathroom set piece involving CG hornets crawling from all of his facial orifices. This sequence turns out to be the major horror set piece : thereafter it fails to follow the contrived but fun Creative Death formula that might have made it a zippier watch.
Instead, CASE 39 meanders glumly to a finale in which Ferland channels Linda Blair by talking in a demonic voice while Renee blandly faces up to her Clichéd Tragic Back-story while defeating evil in an all-too-easy and convenient fashion. Unlike the 70’s horrors it apes, the movie ends on a commercial-friendly note and, while an interesting failure, it’s never scary and weakened by the fact that no one takes much convincing that the kid is pure evil.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
