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| Images courtesy of Dark Arts Entertainment |
Cinematographer turned writer-director Jake Macpherson and distributor
Dark Arts Entertainment might be new to surrealist science-fiction horror
radars but that’s okay because with his debut 2023 labyrinthine horror
mind-game Terror Firma he manages to fully capture your attention almost
immediately. Prior to lensing the
clothing health documentary Let Them Be Naked, Macpherson who wrote,
directed and produced this Lovecraftian horror flick establishes himself right
away as a slick little engine that can.
Somewhere between the grisly fantastical horrors of Mandy and Color
Out of Space lies his first feature, a psychedelic chamber piece revolving
around themes of addiction, lockdowns, troubled coexistences and a surrender of
one’s-self to the strange unknown void of sensory overload.
Starving artist Lola (Faye Tamasa) is forced to move in with
her older brother Louis (Burt Thakur) and his creepy leering long-haired
roommate Cage (Robert Brettenaugh) when an undisclosed lockdown envelops their
Los Angeles home with helicopters flying overhead warning civilians to stay
indoors. In compliance with the
lockdowns, food and other amenities are delivered to their doorstep when Lola
notices a pack of mysterious seeds in an unnamed packet stuck in between the
boxes and out of half-bored curiosity decides to plant the seeds. Not long afterwards, a strange hole in the
ground appears with a cranberry-like substance with psychedelic effects once
ingested. Somehow or another, a portal
or rift in the spacetime continuum is opened and as tensions between the trio
intensifies the film’s grip on fantasy and reality starts to blur.
Exquisitely lensed by Macpherson himself and aided by a John
Carpenter-esque synthetic score by Heavy Arms, this lean mean little number is
an example of the psychedelic microbudget indie done right and well. With not much more than a house, some
post-production effects work and location photography, Macpherson and crew are
able to create a rule-bending genre-defying post-COVID In the Earth by
way of Incredible But True film. Performances across the board are mostly fine with Faye Tamasa
from The Gray Man making an excellent and resourceful scream queen. Character actor Robert Brettenaugh from Strange
Blood is a formidably certifiable sicko with a God complex that would make Mandy
and its adversary Jeremiah Sand blush.
Burt Thakur of all people was a Jeopardy! Contestant in the early
2000s and is notable for being among the last broadcasts featuring Alex Trebek
before his passing.
Ostensibly a streamer in the same vein as The Void or
The Pink Cloud, Terror Firma not to be confused with a certain Lloyd
Kaufman Troma film Terror Firmer is a slick horror head trip which doesn’t
necessarily wow but for being a microbudget first-timer Macpherson has nevertheless
turned over a solid debut chiller. High
on the creepy awkward ick factor thanks to Brettenaugh and visually arresting
thanks to Macpherson’s cinematography and editor Bryan Wilson’s hyperkinetic cutting,
it manages to make an impression with a minimal cast and little resources to
their creative advantage. As a newly
formed distributor and boutique label releasing their work through MVD, Dark Arts
Entertainment is off to a good start in a film that takes a warped but wise
look at the consequences of the lockdown and what sort of strange shenanigans
might arise over people being kept together in such close quarters.
--Andrew Kotwicki
