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| All Stills Courtesy: Cleopatra Entertainment/MVD |
Horror actress Devanny Pinn makes her feature directorial debut with The Black Mass, a hybrid of true-crime film and college-campus slasher, now on blu-ray and streaming from Cleopatra Entertainment and MVD. The film has some intriguing ambitions, and certainly tries to bring a different sort of take to the material – I absolutely will give it credit for that. However, it ultimately feels like an awkward failed experiment that isn’t quite sure what it actually wants to be. I’m not sure if it is Pinn’s shortcomings as a first-time director, weaknesses in the underbaked story and script, or a combination of both, but The Black Mass takes its theoretically interesting and macabre premise and does very little that is particularly interesting or worthwhile with it, mainly leaving me with the puzzled question, what exactly is this film supposed to be, and how are we supposed to feel about what it’s doing?
The film is a fictionalized account of a day in the life of a real-life serial killer, leading up to one of his most notorious massacres, at a Florida sorority house in 1978. The film is told entirely from the killer’s perspective, as the camera follows him around acting as his POV. We rarely see the killer’s face clearly – he is often in soft focus or seen from behind, as the actor becomes a stand-in for the real-life evil and the camera voyeuristically takes on his over-the-shoulder perspective, which is a very intriguing and unnerving stylistic device. We follow the killer as he stalks various women on the college campus, preparing for the rampage that we know is coming. The intention is clearly to make the film a slow-burn – occasionally punctuated with the killer’s violent hallucination – building up to the very violent and brutal finale.
The problem is that the slow-burn doesn’t really work because the film lacks much well-built suspense, and even worse, lacks much psychological or emotional insight into the killer. We never get into his headspace or learn anything much about his psychology or compulsions; we literally are just following him around. Maybe the film is trying to take on a sort of cold and eerie emotional distance, but mainly it just ends up feeling like a fly-on-the-wall observance with insufficient meaning or context. It is unclear what we are supposed to learn from any of this about the killer, or how we are supposed to feel about it.
You surely will have noticed that I haven’t actually said who the real-life serial killer is, who the film is about. That is because the film makes the absolutely baffling choice to treat this information as a mystery. The film tells us that it is a true story, and even tells us the year and location when/where it is set, but oddly chooses to withhold the name of the killer we are following around – in the credits he is simply credited as “Me” to maintain the mystery and play off of the whole POV angle – and then treats it as a big reveal when the killer’s name is revealed in the film’s final moments. I cannot get over what a bizarre choice this is, especially since they give us more than enough information at the start for plenty of viewers to already know. And even stranger, they cast an actor who looks exactly like the actual serial killer, and when, about ten minutes into the film, someone asks his name, he answers, with the serial killer’s actual first name. It is incredibly obvious who the film is about. But since the movie seems to act like it’s a mystery, and acts like it’s a twist when the information is revealed, I won’t spoil the “surprise,” even though they pretty much do that on their own.
The film is postscripted with some blocks of text that attempt to contextualize it all, and which place an interesting focus on the survivors of the massacre, and what they did afterwards to help future survivors of violent crimes. The credits end with a dedication “to all those affected by [serial killer’s name redacted], we see you… not him.” All of this reads like an interesting and noble attempt to make the film into something survivor-focused and perhaps even feminist, and flip the script on the trope of the exploitative serial-killer horror movie. Except… that’s not what this film is, at all; these blocks of text belong at the end of a totally different film that is much better and more interesting than this one. Throughout the film, all we do is see him – the women who become his victims and survivors are barely characters, and are given minimal character development and no internal lives to speak of. They are pretty much just background characters in the vaguely-told story of the lead-up to his massacre. These blocks of text at the end feel like a too-little-too-late attempt on the part of Pinn to retrofit some sort of meaning or thoughtful themes onto a film that she realized far too late had none; that she maybe even regretted framing the whole thing through the gaze of a misogynist predator, and she’s trying to compensate for that. More than anything, they just add another layer to the central mystery of The Black Mass, which is not “what serial killer are we following” or “what is going on inside his psyche,” but just “what is Pinn even trying to say to us with this film?”
It doesn’t help that the film is pretty rough around the edges, even for an indie production. As I said at the beginning, it has some strong stylistic touches that Pinn deserves credit for: the bold choice to keep the killer typically obscured in the foreground as more of a symbol or cypher than a main character is pretty inspired, and the steadicam and handheld work used to do so is quite strong. But then a lot of the film’s blocking and choreography is very clumsy and bad. The killer far too often lurks right out in the open, walking across an open lawn with no sneakiness whatsoever, parking his car right within eyesight of the victim he is stalking, or standing directly outside a window where any of the characters would see him if they looked remotely in that direction. He has none of the stealth that movie slashers typically have, and it strains disbelief to the breaking point to think that he gets away with this repeatedly without ever being seen.
The film’s audio is also downright bad. A lot of dialogue sounds muffled and distorted, with noises over the dialogue which sound like they could be lav mics rubbing against the fabric inside an actor’s shirt, or maybe a short in a mic cable. At other times dialogue is distorted from the levels peaking and blowing out. It is all very distracting, and I would go as far as to say (as someone who works in production, and has experience with low-budget audio) unacceptable. I am genuinely shocked that this film was released with this audio, and that they didn’t ADR the scenes in question to fix these technical flaws. I always try to be lenient with low-budget indie productions, when it comes to having limited resources to work with, but even for a micro-budget indie in this day and age, this audio is bad.
I don’t want to punch down – I know how much hard work goes into a film. I absolutely will happily say that when it comes to the handheld and steadicam shooting of the killer’s sinister and stylized POV, Devanny Pinn shows some strong stylistic flair, and I do think that she could grow into a better director; I certainly think she could make a better movie than this, and I hope she does. But this is just such a fundamentally misjudged movie, with so many baffling choices, that it leaves very little to make it worth recommending or watching, and the technical roughness of the production doesn’t help. It is certainly some kind of attempt to make a different sort of true-crime film, but I don’t think it has fully grasped what kind of different sort it wants to be, and it is a failed attempt regardless.
- Christopher S. Jordan
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