5/25/20 - Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made (2019) - 5+/10

Who wouldn’t love a faux-realistic haunted film? The fabrication and formulation of this horrific ruse (is it?) is enticing. Its a low budget dalliance with the damned, but does it mean death for you? Of course not, but the presupposition, similar to the old Blair Witch marketing of “its real”, gives it a real-life Ring/Ringu radiance. Now whether the fun is fruitful enough is another question.

It is a mash up of multiple films all in one, by design. The faux documentary aesthetic buttressing the alternating familial, fantastical, and torturously dark 70s Grindhouse-lite was convincingly done. It didn’t pander or become gratuitous. The actual “film” inside the film was sufficiently engaging. The “movieness” of it let it breathe a bit more when it might otherwise have suffocated if it was forced to hold up its own weight. It is fun in its oddity and its retro simplicity. That same simpleness also leads to its lessening, namely in the claymation scene. Just a bit too janky. But the fleeting but often snippets of “evil” slipped into the film and on the print does imbue a sense of the ominous. Not enough for terror, but it was different and amusing.

Its basic but well-done enough for its moderate budget, production, and synthesis. It is not scary but is does keep the whole apparatus interesting. For a horror fan, I would assume some solid enjoyment. I might have preferred a bit more “evil”, but it bakes a genre pie with enough toppings to sate a modest horrohound appetite. I must note; if you do watch it, watch the entirety of the film’s runtime - it doesn’t end until it ends.