Revealer (2022)

 A sort of interesting idea that doesn't come off.  Weakness in writing, plotting characterisation and acting prevent this micro-budget effort generating effective terror.

Angie meets the big worm.  I don't think we need to spend too much time deconstructing this image.

Our main character is 'erotic performer' Angie, a dancer in a sex shop called Revealer.  For those of us not familiar with the 1980s sex industry, this kinda like a cam girl deal where a guy would pay a girl on the other side of a plexiglass screen to take her clothes off.  No, it doesn't sound much fun.  The 80s were a terrible time and I am amazed we survived.  The other main is and League of Decency type Sally.  The End of the World happens and somehow they end up huddled in the cramped confines of Angie's booth as all Hell literally breaks out around them.

Soon they are fighting wriggling penis monsters and the demon lord Asmodeus - though I am almost sure it was just some dude in a mask.

Asmodeus, it must be said, gives a very unconvincing performance in this film.  Far from his best work.

Naturally, as they struggle to survive they finding out there is more to the other than they realised.  One secretly has a Heart of Gold (tm) and the other's religious fanaticism is driven by repressed Sapphic desire.  So the true nature of both is revealed (geddit?) over the course of the film.

Of course, you can do good things with familiar material.  Witness Carnage Park - not an original idea in its head, but carried off with such brio it FELT new and exciting.  Revealer doesn't.

The story idea has potential.  I like when films deliberately refuse to open things up, change locations, switch scenes and move our attention all over the show.  Revealer boldly sets almost the entire first half inside the tawdry sex shop and almost entirely within the confines of Angie's booth.   After that they try to some 'bootlegger' tunnels; and if there is one thing I like it is tunnels.  But in spite of featuring two of my favourite things, the film is flat.

The script could be described - generously - as adequate.  It tells a story, without flair.  The dialogue is banal.  Most of the time the girls bicker pointlessly and repetitively.  They never say anything that startles us or makes us see their situation in a new way.  

The lack lustre script isn't improved by the performances.  The film has essentially two characters - other than Angie (is she perhaps something of an angel?) and Sally; inevitably this puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of the two leads.  They don't really rise to the occasion.  I mean, they are alright.  Their performances aren't any better or worse than what you get in a lot of low grade horror films but the relentless focus on them highlights the limitations in their performances.

Sally - surrounded by dildoes - appropriates her own phallic object.  I could analyse this image for days.

It doesn't help that the script makes the characters seem stupid.  Angie is stuck in her room because the door is jammed; Sally, fleeing the apocalypse (though smugly assured her own inevitable rapture is imminent) spends a lot of time trying to breaking into Angie's booth, even dragging herself through a gap they hack in the wall.  Why she wants to trap herself more thoroughly with a person she purports to despise is perplexing - perhaps later on, when Sally confesses her love for Angie it might be justified, but there needed to be an explanation for us (and her) at the time.  Even stranger is Angie's refusal to contemplate leaving the booth - though she has a compelling reason to get moving, after banging on the door a few times she seems content to hunker down and doesn't seem interested in trying to see what is going on out there, casually accepting Sally's claim it is the end of the word.

Even more curiously, when they finally do stir themselves to go out through the floor, they spend ages tearing at it with their fingers - even though they have obtained a perfectly good crowbar which is just begging to be used (also, as they paw at the wooden covering on the floor, you can see they are standing on it, presumably to stop it lifting up.)  Later, they decide to batter their way through the floor using a torch as a hammer; in fairness, one is also using the crowbar - but why risk damaging the torch?

From their they drop down into an endless maze of tunnels, supposedly relics of the prohibition era.  Curiously, these tunnels are well lit, with electric lights every few metres, and are soundly constructed from brick.

Unionised bootleggers made sure their smuggling tunnels were up to code.

I mean, I know that's just the tunnels the film makers had to go with ... but you have to hang lampshades on these things.  "Wow, I wonder who put lights down here?" would have been adequate.  Bizarrely, the girls act like the lights aren't their at all, flashing the torch about and firing up an old lantern they find.  It's ... curious, and the way the film makers expect us to just not notice this sort of stuff inhibits our ability to lose ourselves in the story.

The mis-en-scene of the film works against taking it seriously. The image above is just one example.  Heck, the setting could have been interesting - a 80s sex shop could be a grotesque environment of pools of darkness and eerie neon, dark figures and shapes lurking ominously in the shadows.  And a film set largely in a confined, claustrophobic space has great potential.  But it doesn't work - the scenes with Angie and Sally crammed together lack the required sense of entrapment.  Worse, in the background of the booth is giant image of a pair of buttocks in a glowing neon thong, which undermines any seriousness or horror that might have been developing.

Them fancy acting classes didn't teach ya how to do all serious with a giant glowing ass in the background, did they?

Perhaps the most authentically 80s thing about the whole project is the oppressive sound design.  Whoever arranged the score is the hardest working person on the project - most scenes have a signature piece of music tacked on, above background levels.  It's intrusive and distracts from the performances and actually serves to deflate scenes - any tension is dispersed as you become aware of the persistent chords impinging on your consciousness.  Like I said, a hallmark of 80s horror - watching the original A Nightmare on Elm Street again, it is hard to stay properly terrified as Fred Kreuger launches his assaults to blasting waves of trite electro-rock muzak.

That said, this isn't a terrible film.  It is what it is.  It's a film shot on a tiny budget, with limited resources.  Everyone probably had fun making it and learned from the experience.  It's perfectly possible to enjoy the film as long as you don't expect Bergman's The Seventh Seal, Roy Andersson's Songs From The Second Floor or even Hal Hartley's apocalypse themed The Book of Life.  It doesn't have these ambitions.  The film makers wanted to make a simple, quirky story about two antagonistic people thrown together in a peepshow booth at the end of the world, and they succeeded to an extent.

There are some good ideas which could have been executed better, but at least they tried - rather than just making some 80s slasher film clone having the girls run about in the woods being chased by some dude in a mask (technically, they had the girls run around in the tunnels being chased by some dude in a mask - but you know what I mean.)  And anything that gives actors, technicians, writers and directors the chance to hone their skills has to be saluted.  Making independent films on microbudgets is NOT for the fainthearted.

And there are some well executed sequences.  Jumping about through the film to find my screenshots, I was struck by how cleverly lit and composed some of the shots were - the peepshow booth and the tunnels allow for a lot of fun; the scene where Sally comes out to Angie is well done, capturing the claustrophobic stage play atmosphere you thing the rest of the film was struggling to achieve - and gives Shaina Schrooten a chance to show her acting chops.   It's good to see both female leads have gone on to further projects which will (hopefully) give them better material to work with; director Boyce is working on an interesting sounding project called Revivial.  there is enough going on in Revealer to make me willing to check it out.

Star Rating: *