Reviews: Infernal

Our resident horror fanatic throws down an early review of Infernal. 

"Until you stop calling me Carol Anne
I'm keeping my back turned, you sonsabitches."

Bryan Coyne is the director, writer, and producer for Infernal. His other projects that you may know him for are Harvard Park and Utero which Coyne claims is “a somewhat spiritual successor” to Infernal. That is currently in post production. Utero is a separate project, and not a sequel to Infernal. 

Honestly, before I had time to sit down and watch the entire film, I quickly glanced at a couple parts, only for a couple seconds to get a grasp on what this thing was about. During this sneak peek, it looked just like any other standard horror film where something creepy happens with the innocent little kid. My assumptions were both right and wrong. 

Finally sitting down to watch it, the first scene was not impressive. Establishing shots are extremely important and this failed to make the grade. The acting was okay, but the badly done voice overs were grating. It was only noticeable for this one particular scene, but it still wasn't off to a good start. There were also a lot of royalty-free sound effects that looped and didn't change throughout the entire movie. This gives the film a cheap feel that is extremely apparent in low budget horror. 

Infernal gave me something that not many horror movies can do nowadays. It made me laugh in a genuine way! Sometimes you get to that point in movies where you're begging for a lifeline or something that sets the movie apart from all the others that share the same type of story. This film did have some great one liners that I enjoyed, and it made the repetitive story a little more tolerable. The acting of the two main characters, Andy Ostroff and Heather Adair was mostly believable, but the little girl Alyssa Koerner, blew them out of the water. 

"Oh GOD!!! How did we get ourselves
into this crappy movie?!!!"

Another tough area that a lot of horror movies have been touching on is the handheld effect. And the characters act stupidly with their recording devices. "Let's record everything we do! Why? Why not, it's a great idea and there's not anything weird or unrealistic about it.". It's cool that they're trying to make it seem like the audience is actually there. But every time one of the actors has to pick up the camera while creepy things are going on, it's just a reality check for me. However, I liked that in Infernal, they used a few real quick cut frames, not any more than a couple frames per second, for you to question what you saw. Two thumbs up for that decision. 

Overall, despite the few laughs and cool camera tricks, to me it wasn't enough to set it apart from every other straight to video release. The ending was very predictable, and it was by no means scary. It's certainly better than some others I've seen, but still not worth a second watch. 



-Kirsten Anderson