Lore
Four friends hiking to the site where they will make camp for the night, one of them dawdling conspicuously behind, when Sally, Dan, Mark and Donna arrive at the meeting point at the edge of the forest they find that they are the only ones who made the trip, their host Darwin telling them that all the others dropped out of the promised “experience that will stay with you for the rest of your life.”
Over the campfire he tells them the history of the site, how thirty years before the discovery of three skulls led to an archaeological excavation which uncovered thousands of buried skeletons, encouraging his guests to participate in the protection ritual against the evil which lurks within the land, each telling stories of fear as they place totems into the fire…
A portmanteau of four stories bound by the framing story of The Campfire, they are Shadows, where an indebted man seeks shelter in an industrial site, The Hidden Woman, as a mother and her young son are haunted in their new home, Cross Your Heart, where a run-down hotel hosts some swinging fun, and The Keychain Man where the cinema advertising the previous segments hosts a disastrous midnight premiere, the entirety comprising Lore.
Variously directed by Patrick Ryder and James Bushe from scripts by Ryder, Bushe and Christine Barber-Ryder with Cross Your Heart written and directed by Greig Johnson, The Munsters’ Richard Brake is suitably creepy as Darwin, spinning yarns of the festering evil which has screamed at the stars since before time and demands appeasement but the subsequent segments fail to rise to the sinister promise he has made.
With Primeval’s Andrew Lee Potts playing “murder in the dark” in a warehouse and Hosts’ Jennifer K Preston bothered by an antique gramophone player which defies the recycling bin, the son whom she treats as a toddler presumably intended to be played by a child younger than the actor who was actually cast, they are let down by dialogue and situations which lack inspiration, The Hidden Woman repeatedly lifting scares directly from Lights Out and both dragging across twice the length the flimsy premises support.
The whole film screaming “set up” from the opening moments, the eventual fate of Rufus Hound’s boorish husband is telegraphed as he badgers his bored wife into complicity, and in its favour the folk horror influenced Cross Your Heart does not take itself too seriously, though presumably meant to be played as a broader comedy The Keychain Man is as devoid of laughs as the pick and mix station is empty of any product, the final twist back at the camp site a moment to be welcomed not so much in that it is a shock but in that it signals the telling of the Lore has arrived at its overdue end.
Lore will be streaming exclusively on the IFC Channel from Monday 26th August, in select UK Cinemas from Friday 27th September and then available on home entertainment from Monday 21st October
