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Overview
today we talk about a movie that focuses on the job of police officer. And this poor officer is new to the job, and not prepared for what they get. I don’t know, if I was told to watch an abandoned station as my first assignment, I’d already be reconsidering my job.
What’s happening here? Is it haunted? Is it some otherworldly supernatural happenings? Cult? Just a mentally disturbed person? And is the cop all together? So many questions.
If you like traditional horror, this one is a good choice. Plenty of jump scares and stuff to make you feel uneasy. the sound work is fantastic. If you’re looking for a good onboarding movie, this one will fill the bill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Shift
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2965466/
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Transcript
Stephen: this is like episode seven, six or seven with season four. Yeah. I think
Rhys: there’s three
Stephen: left after this.
Yeah. Okay.
Rhys: For starters, I wanna say I’ve been listening to the old podcasts and I want to apologize for people who are trying to listen. Some of the sound quality on occasions is not the best on certain episodes.
Stephen: I ha y we’re not exactly a professional equipment in the studio no,
Rhys: I got you.
I did get new headsets, so I’m trying to adjust for it. So hopefully this helps a
Stephen: little bit. I never thought the sound quality was super bad. I thought it was acceptable and I wanted do a shout out. Friend of mine, Shirley class ran into her at another friend’s retirement party and did not know.
She used to write movie reviews for newspaper and stuff. Oh, wow. And big in the movies. Shout out to Shirley. If she’s listening, she may have listened to, went, oh, I can’t take this or something. But she likes horror movies too. So if she’s listening, shout out. We’ll, actually you’ll get to meet her in September.
Okay, great. And there’s an announcement frame of listening, which it might be after the fact now, but you’re doing your horror talk in September in Pennsylvania.
Rhys: I am we did one last October. Was it?
Stephen: Yeah, it was about a year ago.
Rhys: It went really well. And we’re using the same topic again, why horror is important as a genre.
Stephen: So I look forward to it. Yeah. Yeah. If anybody knows of any really good horror conventions coming up, we missed the Monster Bash down in Pittsburgh a month ago.
Rhys: Yeah, that’s too bad
Stephen: because we always look forward to going to Pittsburgh. Driving in that town is a mess. Yeah, just don’t take the toll roads.
It’s $30 to drive from here to Pittsburgh. I’m like, dude, it’s like an hour and 20 minutes. Yeah, it’s a toll every five miles. But that’s last shift. Yes. This that is the movie we’re supposed to be talking
Rhys: about, correct. The profession in this movie. This is our, I believe, our second police based profession movie.
Stephen: Yes. And this one’s in the US instead of Turkey. This time.
Rhys: Yes. This is an American film and I listen, as I said, I’ve been listening to old episodes and I always hear Steve talking about a slow burn. This movie’s much more high octane than a slow burn.
Stephen: It’s definitely one of those. Yeah. Yeah. Now here’s the, dual thinking of me for me on this.
So if someone’s coming to the podcast and we talk about this I normally watch Jason or Friday 13th or in city, the standard in the movie, big releases, which man horror has been blowing up for the past year or two. It’s like the biggest box office draw and everything. So that, that we should probably have a whole discussion on that at some point.
But if you’re used to those types of movies, A lot of what we talk about, you may be going, what the heck are these guys into this? It’s not your cup of tea if that’s what you’re used to. This movie, on the other hand, pro probably is, it’s got all the typical stuff, the jump scares, the buildup.
But honestly for me, I watched it going, eh, it didn’t have a lot for me. It was a good movie solid. But pretty much all of it’s been done. Or I. Oh oh, I spoiler alert, like always. Oh, I know that cop’s not really there. He’s dead. Oh, look, the back of his head’s blown out. I had a lot of that throughout this movie, so it’s not bad in any regard.
It’s just, I think we’ve had a lot of movies that really supersede this one in the quality of what
Rhys: it is. And that’s a real problem once you really delve into almost any topic, right? If you get into it deep enough, you’re gonna find that you need to push yourself more and more. And what other people find we went to see Barbarian.
I took the kids, right? And there’s that scene where she rips off the guy’s arm and starts beating him with it. And I laughed at it in the theater. My daughter turns at me and she is like, what is wrong with
Stephen: you? If she doesn’t know what’s wrong with you, by this point, she hasn’t been paying attention.
Yeah,
Rhys: this film also came out in 2015 A lot of the conventions that are used in this, they’ve been used for a very long time, but they’ve become more and more prevalent as time has proceed, gone on it. It had three nominations for awards and it won. And the one that it won, I think is very fitting because it was for best sound editing.
Oh, nice. And the sound work in this movie is incredible. It’s like all the microphones are turned up to 21.
Stephen: Every little noise hired a spinal tap to do their sound. Yeah. But they had to get it done before the new documentary came out
Rhys: yeah. It’s 88 minutes long. It’s a nice, nice duration.
It premiered at London’s Fright Fest. Fright Fest Film Festival, roughing to say on October 25th, 2014. So it actually debuted there about a year before it actually went out on for video on demand.
Stephen: Oh, okay. Yeah. And I can see that. ’cause I didn’t remember this one being in the theater. Yes.
See that
Rhys: you’re correct. It was not, I was watching this with my son last night and he was like that place just looks. It doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look like a police station, but it was actually an abandoned police station in Sanford, Florida, where just like in the movie, they had built a new one and decommissioned that one.
And so they went in to shoot it. And they shot the whole thing there. It took them 10 days to shoot. They all night shoots, get everything done. One of the things that I like about this movie is the pacing. The pacing in this film is very good. Where they de Blasey, Anthony de Blasey is the director.
He pushes the speed of what’s happening up to a point where it keeps you on edge. But if you pushed it a little too far, it wouldn’t be scary
Stephen: anymore. I could see that. Yeah, definitely.
Rhys: It’s like the Silent Hill series, we’ve talked about it. Love Silent Hill. But one of the games I love to play the most is the third version where you play the daughter as she’s proceeding through all this stuff.
The problem with it is the scares happen so much that after maybe you’ve been playing for four hours, it’s just you’re running around shooting stuff, it’s turned into doom by then. Yeah, there’s scary stuff, but you’re seeing it all the time anyways.
Stephen: You. Funny you say that. ’cause I said the same thing.
I’m like, oh, this guy’s like Silent Hill type stuff. The lights blink and you see something, they blink again and it’s gone. And I thought the whole thing felt like an adventure horror, A very silent Hill type game. Yeah. I don’t know if you played that trailer for the horror that was supposed to be with Darryl from Walking Dead.
Yeah. In the hallway. But every time you went through the hallway, things changed and something different was there. You had to look. I’m like, this is a great horror because she goes into this room, then here’s the phone ring runs over there and it’s something different. But that triggered that something else changed.
And she sees that and that scares her. But then there’s a noise over here and she, so it would be a great video game to a point, but it was very almost linear. Like then this happens to trigger that and that happens to trigger that, you’re right. It was not a lot of story, which is why it was like I know it’s going to happen.
Yeah.
Rhys: We’ll come back to this in just a second, but since you brought it up Anthony Licey, who directed it and wrote it, I wanted to make a fast-paced, traditional horror movie on a small budget, and he wanted it to be in a small contained set, which he got. And using sound design as a major component, which he successfully did, but he also wanted to be right on top of Juliana Harkavy, who plays Jessica, which has resulted in people comparing this movie the camera work to playing a video game.
Oh, there you go. Yeah, you had that whole video game tie-in thing
Stephen: there. It totally felt like it, yeah. And you said sound work was amazing. It was always something. To pay attention to. This is not one you can, be washing dishes easily and keep up with.
Rhys: Yeah. And as far as movies go, I did, I, this just recently happened.
I watched Terra Oh, okay. Which is a nice slasher. And it is, it was new with a recurring character and I enjoyed it. It was pretty good. Then Terra Fire two came out and I watched it and it has the whole pacing issue where it is. And it’s not really pacing as in action, it’s more pacing as in gore where there’s just gore on top of gore.
On top of gore, on top of gore. So it completely dilutes the impacts of having those really gory scenes. ’cause there’s never a breakthrough the movie,
Stephen: you get numb and immune to it. Yeah. It’s like action movies with some comedy in it. You throw the comedy in it, sprinkle it in just right, and it becomes one of the best action and comedy movies you’ve ever seen.
But yeah, you overdo either element and totally loses. Yeah. I think that’s why straight comedy movies I get bored with because. It’s one-liners all the way through, and after a while it’s okay, whatever.
Rhys: Yeah. So the pacing of this movie is amazing, and just in a nutshell, you have this rookie cop who gets assigned to close out the last shift at a decommissioned police station.
And as you might guess, she runs into supernatural
Stephen: issues. And that starts right away. It is e, e, everything. The only, again, jumping ahead a bit, the only character that was in there that was mentioned that I didn’t really come back and didn’t contribute, what I thought may have happened was the hooker standing there smoking marigold.
Yeah. I was waiting for her to come back. I was waiting for something else to happen with her, but not really. A whole lot did. And that was the only one. Everybody else, like the old guy talking to her, I’m like, yeah. Oh, they’re mentioning her dad,
Rhys: yep. Lee Grimes did the makeup and he would spend tons of time each day making sure that it was just right.
And he did a really good job. Yeah. One of the hardest shots in here is when officer price finger guns himself to death. Because in order to actually get the blood to flow from his nose and his mouth, they actually had to do green screen hoses that went over his face and then clone them out, and they did a great job.
You can’t see it at all, but that is actually one of the few examples of any kind of c g I that’s in this film. It’s almost all practical
Stephen: effects. Yeah. And even that, the blood’s practical, so Yeah, that’s true.
Rhys: Yeah. Pay. Anthony De Blasey wrote this. He shared a writing credit with Scott Poey who he has worked with in the past and continues to work with to this day.
And the concept of the Payman family was based on the Mansons, obviously. Yeah. It’s pretty obvious. He likes to shoot in long hallways, and this place had three really long hallways in it where usually he has to do camera tricks to make it look like the hallways longer than it is. And this one was long enough that they could just go for.
Ever. And he really uses that. He admitted, he was like, I probably overdid it sometimes because the actress would be running down and he would be following her and then they’d do it again and again. So she was getting some some good steps in for the day. Good
Stephen: cardio. She’s ready for her marathon at the end of the movie.
Movie, yeah.
Rhys: And it was Ridley as White and Stark as it appeared in the movie. In reality, that was, Price’s thing was like, it’s just too, it’s so white and it’s that’s how it was. And instead of fighting against it, he decided to just embrace it, put her in all black and put her against this stark white for the contrast.
Stephen: Yeah. It was very stark. And it gave you a very desolate feel.
Rhys: You’re gonna, you’re gonna this backstory for Anthony DeBlasi. He’s an American, he is born in Boston and he graduated from Emerson College with a degree in film. Now if you go to Emerson College, at least back when he went part of their program at the end includes an internship where they send you out to LA and you intern with an actual studio.
His internship happened at Marvel Studios before the release of the very first Spider-Man movie.
Stephen: Oh, wow. How much better is that?
Rhys: It was actually bad ’cause he got there and it was all done. They were like working on the credits is what they were doing. So he was more interested in horror and he called his advisor and he’s Hey, is there anybody out here that’s more along these lines that I can talk to talk?
And they’re like, yeah, we can set you up with a production house. So he goes to interview for an internship at this production house and ends up in this room with Joe Daly, who turns out to be his production partner in now Present day and Clive Barker. It was Clive Barker’s production house. Nice. And he liked the two of them liked each other so well.
He interned for Clive Barker for two weeks before he got hired
Stephen: on full time. Wow. That’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve always loved Clive Barker books and movies.
Rhys: Yep. So his first movie was Clive Barker’s Story Dread. That was his first full length movie. He got the rights from Clive to go ahead and do that movie.
And you can see his influence on this film, especially once you know it, because there’s a whole lot of, I. Wetness.
Stephen: Okay. And you get that in Clive Barker films because, Clive Barker did Books of Blood yeah. And the prince of Darkness with the whole, demon in a green glowing jar Yeah.
Of liquid lava lamp.
Rhys: He’s directed 11 total pieces, and they are all horror or horror adjacent pieces, like one of the least horror pieces I’m trying to think what it’s called. It’s about religious person who comes up and knocks on your door and wants to talk to them about their religion, and the guy actually becomes infatuated with a girl who lives there.
And so he’s constantly stalks her. That’s like the least horror of everything that he’s
Stephen: got on his list. It is. We’ve talked about to some people that’s a deep, dark rooted fear, and it makes it the most horrific movie for them. They,
Rhys: it certainly could be a horror movie.
Stephen: They, a lot, some people consider the other stuff fantasy,
Rhys: yeah. People have said Clive Barker’s books are almost like fantasy books in that he builds such a back world that is independent of our own, and he fill it with so much lore in things. It’s like reading a Dragon Rider’s a Per, or something like that, where you are transformed, transported to somewhere else where the rules, don’t really apply.
He is married to Natalie Victoria who played the Hooker Marigold in this movie. Okay. They were dating at the time, but
Stephen: He should be proud. His girlfriend made a really good hooker.
Rhys: That’s right. He has a new movie that is releasing this year, if it hasn’t already, and it is called Malam. Okay.
I haven’t seen it. It’s really odd because you and I have talked about remakes before. Malam is a big budget remake of last shift.
Stephen: Oh, really? Oh, we’ll have to watch it and see.
Rhys: Yeah. He said he loved Left Shift, but it was done on a small budget and it couldn’t get a theatrical run out of it.
So they did Malam still relying heavily on practical effects, but with enough money that it’ll actually be circulated in theaters.
Stephen: That, that would be nice to add to the repertoire somewhere, a bonus or something, if nothing else, and compare it. Yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: So the cast, you have Juliana Har, Juliana Harkavy, who plays Jessica.
She, missionary was the name of the one. She tried out for that movie to be the girl in missionary, but at the time she was too young. Oh, wow. And Deis, he thought it looked creepy. But he liked what he saw, so he hired her when she was older to do this. The film was really taxing on it, on her because she’s in every single scene.
Yeah.
Stephen: Most of ’em by herself. Yeah. So she’s, yeah, a lot.
Rhys: She’s she’s American in her mid thirties. She’s been in 28. Other projects I. Starting in 1995 in a film called A Little Princess. She was in Dolphin Tail, two episodes of The Walking Dead. She did an a episode of the Constantine series.
Stephen: Oh, really?
Rhys: But she’s best known as Dina Drake, the Black Canary from the UW Arrowverse.
Stephen: Oh, yep. Okay. Now it clicks. Yep, I see that.
Rhys: She has two projects in the works right now. One’s called a film. One is a film called Aila Stro. As an I S L A Island of Monsters, and she’s got an episode of LA Law, which I didn’t know was still actually being
Stephen: produced, but of course those shows never die, N C I S and that she
Rhys: said the location itself creeped her out.
She felt like anything could happen at any time.
Stephen: That’s great. That adds to the whole reactions of stuff. Yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. And she loved working with Deisi. She’s he is an actor’s director. She would work with him many times, she said. Natalie Victoria played Marigold. She is an American actress.
She’s married to Deisi. They were dating during the filming of last shift and were engaged by the time the press tour started going on for it. She’s been involved in 31 projects. The vast majority of them have been movies. She had an uncredited role in Pirates of the Caribbean at World’s End. That was her first role.
And she’s been on other titles like The Day of the Living Dead. On a section of ABCs of Death, two and a Half, and lots of Desi’s titles. She was super productive. She’s got four projects in right now. But there was a period in her career where there’s like this dead space and she was involved in an accident which resulted in some sort of traumatic brain injury.
So she actually stepped away from the industry for three years to recover, and she’s coming back. She will be in Mallam. And she has another upcoming project called Bluegrass Run, which is in pre-production. That doesn’t sound like a horror movie, but I guess it all depends on your musical taste.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. Hank Stone plays Sergeant Grip Cohen. He’s been in 63 films dating back to 1986. Tons of television appearances. A 1995 movie. Called The Walking Dead.
Stephen: Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Rhys: He was also in The Patriot and the 2004 version of The Punisher burn Notice the Tenant and the Birth of a Nation.
Stephen: So he’s one of those guys that you’ve probably seen him somewhere but not remembered.
Yeah.
Rhys: Jay LaRose is an American actor. He plays the homeless guy. He is Really? Yeah, he is Michael Rucker’s brother-in-law.
Stephen: For real. For real. Wow. All these Walking Dead connections. ’cause we still have another Walking Dead actor coming up too. Yeah, that’s interesting.
Rhys: He’s a year younger than us and he is been in 71 projects starting in 98 in an episode of TV mini series called From the.
He’s played a recurring character in Saw three and saw four, the character known as Troy, as well as being an Insidious Mother’s Day. The Tenet 11. 1111, the Barons Insidious Chapter two Wind Walkers and three episodes of Ray Donovan. He did appear on an episode of Fear of The Walking Dead, and he’s also in Isla Montro,
Stephen: Oh, that’ll be interesting when that comes out.
He definitely likes that horror genre. Yeah.
Rhys: Joshua ml, an American actor from Georgia. He plays John Michael Payman. He’s also known as a playwright. He does plays for the youth for children. Really? Yeah. Oh.
Stephen: Considering the character he had on Walking Dead. Oh. And on here too. Yeah. Yeah. And I noticed he had three names.
I always say The Serial Killer psychos have three names, so I love the fact that he gave them three names. Yeah.
Rhys: The titles, two of the titles for his, some of his plays are the Monster Hunters and good Trouble on bad Island.
Stephen: That sounds like a kid’s thing.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. He’s been involved in 91 projects that are actually not on stage.
He was on an episode of Vampire Diaries, the Good Lie, Terminator Genesis Intruders, heist Extraction, dirty Grandpa. I think that’s the first time we’ve had anyone from Dirty Grandpa on our list. Yeah.
Stephen: Everyone take a drink.
Rhys: Yeah. He was on Cell Independence Day resurgence I Tanya, and then 11 episodes of The Walking Dead as Jared.
Yeah, man in the wasp. Ozark and Renfield he was in at Renfield, which is, oh,
Stephen: have you seen that one yet? I have not. It’s fun.
Rhys: I, it looked fun. Yeah. And
Stephen: I will watch it. It’s it’s not outright comedy, but it’s like tongue in cheek horror. Yeah. On the cusp without being berated. Cheesy.
Rhys: Cheesy. He’s got five upcoming projects. Three of ’em are movies called Rectitude Lilly and Brothers, and two television appearances in a show called Damascus and a one called Manhunt. The movie is circulated by Magnet. Magnet actually has a pretty good collection of films which includes such titles as Tucker and Dale.
Let the Right one in the House of the Devil Europa report. So we like them. Yeah. And Goon, which is my favorite hockey movie of all time.
Stephen: Wow. That’s horror hockey. Oh yeah.
Rhys: This movie last shift is rated four on their popularity list. They rate how many, how popular their films are. And this one is number four.
Nice. There is a song that there plays throughout this thing. And so I decided I was gonna like the autopsy of Jane Doe, where I like, could identify the song. You can’t do that with this one because the song was written by Adam Barber, who along with Danielle White, composed the music for the film.
So this song
Stephen: is made whole cloth Nice. It’s just that right mix of creepy fairytale rhyme type of like they did in Freddie with the Jump Rope girls.
Rhys: Yeah. So now we’re gonna talk a little bit about Payman. As an entity because payment is an actual entity. Oh, in
Stephen: Honestly, that one got past me.
I didn’t know that one.
Rhys: Oh since we’re doing the cast. Yeah.
Stephen: Who knows?
Rhys: They do this thing in the movie where they’re like the devil was cast out of heaven. He was an angel who was cast from heaven down into hell. But before the devil there was pa and Pa is actually the king of hell.
And he’s been there since time Immor. How come I
Stephen: didn’t know all this?
Rhys: You didn’t know that part because Deisi wrote that for this show.
Stephen: Oh, okay. Okay.
Rhys: The actual Spirit Payman is recorded in lots of those 16th century grs, where they just started listing. Devils and demons names are just like, yeah, sure.
Okay. But peon is frequently referred to as King peon. He got that part right. But he is one of the most obedient spirits in hell to Lucifer. So he is not looking to overthrow anyone. He, there’s no superiority complex or anything like that. He is like a tote. He is just oh, you’re the greatest.
Unlike the character in the movie there are sources that list Payman as a fallen cherub or a dominion, one of, two different classes of angels. So he was but if you look at it in a more historical standpoint, they believe that Paman was the name of a pre-Christian era. Oh,
Stephen: interesting.
Rhys: He’s d frequently depicted wearing a crown and riding a camel who sometimes in the woodcuts has his own little crown. The camel has a crown of
Stephen: his own. So is he smoking a cigarette?
Rhys: Yeah. He is frequently followed by a couple other guys who play trumpets everywhere he goes. And King Paman is actually the same demon Lord who is worshiped in airy Astor’s heredity.
Stephen: Oh, that’s pretty cool.
Rhys: Yeah. He’s not biblical. He doesn’t, this is not one of those things like Baal or something that comes outta the Bible. This was one of those 15th century gir type deals,
Stephen: probably only because some monk got tired of writing it, so just cut a few of them out and it’s really in some lost
Rhys: book.
Yeah. In the modern occult realm though, he is a source of secrets and science and hidden treasures. And so there are lots of actual ceremonies out there to summon payment to become, ask him for favors kind of deal.
Stephen: Alright. So now I’m gonna have to look around and see if there are other paman centered horror movies or something.
Rhys: Yeah. And for as difficult as they made it look alike in heredity to summon him or in this movie where you have to scar yourself up and hang yourself, I don’t think it would actually be. One of the more popularly summoned entities in today’s modern society, because that’s just too much work
Stephen: for people.
He gets no respect. He’s probably down there pouting
And the use of the demon and all the things she sees. This is one of those movies that you’re always questioning, is it real? Is what she’s seeing a hallucination only by her. It was just one of those movies with a lot of ambiguity. So if if those are the type of movies you enjoy and the horror and the questionability of what’s what, this definitely fits that bill really well,
Rhys: right up to the end.
Yeah. You can watch the ending of it and still not really know. Yep. One or other. Again, you get to choose.
Stephen: It’s one of those after watching it it’s good to grab a couple drinks and sit around with some people and talk about it, because you could probably talk for a while and have various viewpoints and none are wrong or Right.
Yeah.
Rhys: The movie starts out, you have an exterior of a squad car. Jessica the police officer is on, is in there and her mother’s on her cell phone and she’s trying to talk her from taking the job. It’s an old argument between them. Her father was a police officer. You get the feeling that he was killed, if at worse, maybe just injured in action.
But he was hurt. She hurries off her mother off the phone and then gets off the car and enters the station. And it’s a
Stephen: great setup for the story because you get 30 seconds and you totally understand where she’s coming from, the background and all of that for the story without some long, lengthy setup.
Yeah. And that’s always a difficult thing to pull off.
Rhys: Yeah. It’s enough to get you going, and then they add details throughout the movie, so there is no big, giant data dump on you.
Stephen: It’s, very well done to do that. It’s difficult to do, too many people do it poorly.
Rhys: Yeah. And I know Steve is a big advocate for having an amazing sound system to watch these movies on, which I would agree, especially a movie like this where sound is so important, I like the isolation and the intimacy of wearing headphones, which can give you great sound. Yeah. You can get a good set of headphones, they’ve got a amazing sound, and your house could be on fire and you wouldn’t even know it.
But especially in this movie, there’s tons of amazing sounds just in the background. Like as soon as she walks into the station, there’s this low frequency drone that starts as soon as she walks in, which automatically just turns up the tension just a little bit as soon as she sit inside
Stephen: the door.
Which is actually a thing that a lot of horror movies do subtly hit these certain low notes and keep ’em suspended throughout scenes. ’cause it, it just jangles everybody’s nerves without understanding why.
Rhys: The place seems to be empty. And then there’s this guy at the end of the hall and he is pissed off.
He’s got issues. He’s punching the wall. And when he sees that she’s there, he gets pissed off, tells her to turn around, and she turns around and starts to leave. He is I didn’t say walk. I said, turn around. I just kept thinking, you’re wearing a gun, lady. You don’t, didn’t know who this guy is, right.
It turns out it’s Sergeant Cohen. And he points out to her that her job is to sit in this abandoned police station on the last night. It will be open, any official business will be conducted to the new station just down the street. She just needs to sit there and call the station if there’s an emergency.
Stephen: So it starts right off with questioning. Why was this guy acting that way? Is there really something wrong? Is there something wrong with him? Was he just screwing around with her? The rookie leaving him alone? Ha. But also it’s seriously, would they really leave just one cop there?
I question that as actual procedure, but we’ll leave it for the setup.
Rhys: Yeah. She talks about it. She wonders why she’s there and he makes this joke about there’s tons of munitions and hazardous material in the evidence room and everybody in the city’s coming for it and you’re the only thing stopping him and her eyes get big and he is I’m just
Stephen: screwing with you that, see, that’s something I would’ve done.
I love that part. Yeah.
Rhys: And he says that the police department can’t justify paying a security guard to be there when they have lots of police officers already on duty. This, that the city’s paying for. And I can see that, working for the government, they’ll do whatever that to make it look like they’re saving money.
He says hazmat will be showing up between 10 to four to clean up that evidence room, gives you the keys, and he heads out leaving her all alone behind a desk where she’s reading a manual for police officers.
Stephen: Very thick manual.
Rhys: Everything we just talked about all happened in the first six minutes of this movie.
Stephen: Yeah. As really quick setup and right away starts, ’cause there’s this guy yelling, pounding on the wall. Is he deranged? Yep. Is there something wrong with him? Then he turns out to be the sergeant and why is he that, just lots of
Rhys: Yep. She’s sitting there reading, she nods off.
She drops her book, which wakes her back up. She notes some lights are bugging out in the back. She goes back to take a look at those. And then this is like the kind of thing that I’m talking about with the amazing sound. There’s this background noise that’s buzzing and then all of a sudden the phone rings right.
She answers it to hear a girl on the other end of the line who’s asking for help, she says she’s trapped. She think they might all be dead and the line drops before Jess can get any real information out of her. So she calls the news station and tries to get them to help, but they don’t have any information.
They’re pretty useless throughout this movie, really to her.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. And I, and this is the other thing with a lot of horror movies in this one, that is not what a quote unquote typical movie would do, because when she calls and is getting that other guy in the line, 99% of the time they’re going to flip over to us to showing the camera in that busy room with the guy on the phone.
And that’s a character now also. No, they never leave this station. Yeah. That camera doesn’t even really go outside. When she’s outside. It’s from the inside. And that’s a horror movie trope almost, you could say. Yep. The only time
Rhys: it does is when she goes out back to talk to the
Stephen: prostitute.
We’re not gonna show you the normal world. You’re stuck in this world.
Rhys: Yeah. They say they’ll document her call and make sure that all Cal calls are rerouted. So she hangs up the phone and there’s this banging noise in the back of the station. Yeah. I don’t if you’ve ever been anybody out there who’s ever been in an abandoned building, they make noises from time to time, yeah. But it can be creepy,
Stephen: right? Yeah. It, houses, especially our old houses, they’ll just settle, they’ll creek a little when something moves or whatever, and it’s really nothing but it, it is creepy. ’cause right there’s nothing in that place. Yeah. Not even the files.
Rhys: Yeah. So it does, the banging here is more than just settling.
It is actually noisy. She hands back to investigate and finds a bunch of empty rooms. 10 o’clock. She’s sitting there in the commissary eating a sandwich and as she’s chewing it, she feels a hair in it and she’s pulling and pulling. She just keeps pulling until she spits up.
Yeah. And then just throws her food that
Stephen: way. Which is one of those really little things just to make it unsettling. ’cause there’s nothing horrific about that. But why is it that long? And you mentioned the time he’s really good about catching the clock in the background and you’re constantly seeing the clock moving.
Yeah. Closer to when she’s got her freedom.
Rhys: Yeah. Which she never does get. Yeah. Yeah. But then there’s a knock on the door and she heads up to the front of the station. There’s nobody there. She steps outside. On her way back in, she sees this man standing in the foyer with a coat, bare feet, old, creepy, homeless guy.
She comes in and yells at him and he pees on the floor because she pulls out a taser. Kicks on the taser and says, turn around. And so he pees on the floor and part of me wondered if he did that. So he’d be standing in liquid so they wouldn’t tase him.
Stephen: Good point. Or is he just whacked out Crazy.
Rhys: But it, it is a student of Clive Barker you’ve gotta have fluids everywhere anyways, so him peeing on the floor makes all kinds of sense. So she pulls out the baton instead, kicks him out, and then starts to clean everything up while she’s filling the bucket, which I was
Stephen: like, this is the last night.
This place is open and that can stay there for all I care.
Rhys: Okay. People don’t ask Steve to house sit.
Stephen: Yeah. Pull the carpet over it or something.
Rhys: She’s cleaning up. She hear the pipes start making weird noises. She’s following the sound. Sees a set of boots. Up there on a shelf. She grabs them and sets them outside on the curb for the homeless guy.
She’s nice. She’s a nice lady. Yeah.
Stephen: She does several little things like that throughout the whole movie. Yeah.
Rhys: There’s more noises down the hall. She goes back down the hall, opens up the bathroom. It is destroyed. There’s raw sewage everywhere in the sinks.
Stephen: Yeah, it that, that was where I went. Wow. He must have played Silent Hill.
Rhys: She walks out from there into the workout room and then into the locker room, and she goes to the locker number 25 and opens it up. She’s looking at it nostalgically. She opens it up and in the back. The only thing in there is a photograph of her and her dad when she was a little girl.
Stephen: Which she puts it back, which I questioned.
So she pulls
Rhys: it out and she’s gonna put it like, keep it and then she changes her mind and puts it back. Yeah. She doesn’t want to necessarily dwell on the whole past with her history with her father.
Stephen: Yeah. Somebody needs to go some therapy, but that’s a little late for that now.
Rhys: Yep. She closes the she closes the locker and when she turns every other locker in the locker room, the doors are all open at 90 degrees.
Stephen: Yeah. Which was, I thought was a great little thing. Yeah. You know the to, he definitely does a good job of simple things to start with, to much more grand, big things later. It’s a great buildup.
Rhys: Yep. The phone rings, she gets up there and she answers it and it’s the same girl as last time she needs to get out.
Her name’s Monica. She’s on a ranch somewhere. They’re coming. She can hear pigs. Then she hangs up the phone. The phone rings again and Jess picks it up saying, Monica, and No, it’s hazmat. The guy’s we’re swamped, we’re running behind. Who knows when we’ll get there. She’s fine. Joe hangs up the phone.
Stephen: And which again everything leads to her being isolated and alone.
Rhys: Yeah. She calls dispatch all the calls. They assure her have been rerouted. She is not dialing 9 1 1. She’s calling that station. Exactly. And she cannot, Jess cannot trace the call from there. Of course, then they have that moving shelving Yes.
With the thing and the, she start to move and she walks over there and she’s looking at, she’s wondering why it’s not working, and she kinda shrugs and sits back and then it like moves big time and slams into all the others. Again, really great use of sound. Yeah. Because bam, this is the big sound.
Then there’s more noises in the back. She heads back to check into it. She finds that the back door has been propped open with a filing cabinet. She calls it in as a possible breaking, entering, but gets that creepy song over her radio in response. Then the lights go out and the station goes into lockdown.
Stephen: Which again, with the sound and the music, if anyone listening that watches this wow, I really enjoyed that movie. If you haven’t played Silent Hill, you really need to because you’ll love it.
Rhys: Yeah. If you can afford to play it.
Stephen: Yeah. If you don’t already have it. Sorry. Some of them are starting to get on Goggin steam, so
Rhys: Yeah.
She goes into the evidence room and the homeless guy’s on the top shelf of a thing and he is digging through stuff, muttering to himself. He’s like the good whiskey. Yeah. She turns the power back on and she actually climbs up there to arrest him. He tries to run and she shows that she can certainly handle herself.
She takes that baton, takes this guy down. He is way bigger than her cuffs him. She takes a look. He’s wearing the shoes that she gave him. My whole thing was how did she get him down from there?
Stephen: See, I wouldn’t have even gone that far. He already walked in, Pete on the floor, came back. He’s rum you. I just would’ve shot him in the shoulder or something and let him fall down and call the people.
Come and get this guy Now she definitely was nicer than I probably would’ve been at that point.
Rhys: That’s funny. ’cause like she has to take him into holding, he drops to his knee, so she has to drag him in. And I was watching it with my son. He is man, this seems like police brutality to me.
Stephen: And I’m talking about just shoot him.
Yeah. Just I’m old school, the lethal weapon thinking, yeah.
Rhys: It, so I have a theory and I’ll throw it out now. My theory is that when she was back there cleaning up and saw those boots on the shelves, those are John Michael PA’s boots.
Stephen: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So she puts
Rhys: them out there thinking she’s doing a good thing for the homeless guy.
He puts them on and he’s possessed by the spirit.
Stephen: Could have been, but I thought he seemed a little possessed to start with. Yeah. And when she’s trying to throw him in the holding cell, he’s no. So I’m not trying to say you’re wrong, just say, oh no,
Rhys: I actually think it plays into it.
Kind of like he’s there. Yeah. And he knows what happened to Paman when he was in there. And so the rational part of him is I don’t want to go in here. But then when he is in there, he ends up in the exact same situation. The Paman was
Stephen: at the end. True. And you wanna go even deeper. He is got mental instability.
Maybe that’s actually opened up to the other world. He can see it or know about it more than Yeah. And that’s what drove him crazy or something. That’s
Rhys: really a kind of a common character in Stephen King novels and stuff like
Stephen: that. That’s probably where I got it from and why it’s so common to
Rhys: me.
Yeah. She drags him in and when they get in there, the door to holding shuts and the lights go out, he approaches her and she just flat out tasers him. She’s better than shooting him in the shoulder,
Stephen: okay. Yeah. Maybe she should tased him on the shelf. Yeah, sorry. Price
Rhys: he’s knocked out.
She’s locked in the holding cell with him. There’s a face in the window with a pentagram carved into it. And if you ever look up this movie like on a streaming service, that’s the face that comes up with I. It’s John Michael payment’s face with the pentagram carved in it. It scares her.
She drops her flashlight and there’s this amazing, like 15 second scene where there’s nothing. It’s a black screen. And all it is sounds
Stephen: Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead, finish. I was just
Rhys: gonna say things shuffling
Stephen: around in the dark. Yeah. And it’s good. It’s scary like that. But she should have known this is a horror movie.
Flashlights don’t work. It’s the physics of horror movies. Yes.
Rhys: Because Leslie Vernon has gone through and changed out all the batteries.
Stephen: Exactly. His spirit is everywhere.
Rhys: Yes. So you had this amazing black screen scene with all this sound, and then all of a sudden the flashlight shines on her and she’s telling the homeless guy, just go back in the corner and we’re gonna throw cuffs on you.
And then the flashlight illuminates him. So he’s passed out still on the corner. So someone else is in there with her. Yeah. It says, don’t be scared. Do you want to get out of here alive? I’m going to hurt you. And then the lights come on. The door is open. And as she’s walking out right behind her, you can’t, she doesn’t see it.
But we do, there’s two more figures with carved up faces behind the door,
Stephen: which, if you are of the mind that, oh, she’s mentally unstable, something set her off to be here. The scenes when she’s got her back turned and stuff, is there argues against that?
Rhys: That is a great point because my son was all grumbly about the fact that he wants to see what she sees.
So if she doesn’t see it, then why are they including it in the film? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you’re right. That’s a great point. It adds, it actually says, no, this is actually a supernatural thing going on.
Stephen: Yeah. Or everybody in the theater has been affected and we’re all hallucinating.
Could be bad batch of popcorn. Yeah.
Rhys: She gets out, she closes it closes the door, locks, it pulls out her gun, and then starts reciting her oath. As a mantra. Yeah. To get herself under control.
Stephen: And she’s a newbie she doesn’t have a lot of experience with stuff like this or with any, I shouldn’t say stuff like this.
Who does? Yeah. But as cop stuff, so I, it’s all hitting her and she’s probably what do I do? I might be able to handle it if someone’s jaywalking at this point right now and be cool with it. But I just had all this weird stuff going on. I could see her. She does a great job.
The actress of ramping up, freaking out.
Rhys: Yes. Yes, she does. She’s back at the desk. She calls, Cohen gets his answering machine and she’s like thinking about what to tell him. And then she’s just I wanna thank you for this job. I’m not gonna let you down. And then hangs up. And then she leans back and sees the word moss written in what looks like blood over her head.
And then she turns her chair around and the camera rotates and it says, Sal, a female
Stephen: pig. Which actually also, isn’t it So like sewing, reaping the
Rhys: we. That’s that was Price said that too. Yeah. Okay. Or it could be.
Stephen: So yeah, I thought the same thing. I was like, ah, multiple meanings. Yeah.
Rhys: She double checks all the locks and then heads back to check the back door.
When she goes out there, she sees Marigold is out there smoking, she asks her to leave and she asks if she can finish her cigarette. And that kind of makes sense. If I was. In a risk a risk averse profession, and I want to take a break. A police station would be a good place to do it,
Stephen: They all know you anyway.
Rhys: Yeah. So then she says she was there when the payments arrived and killed themselves. The actual story that was in the press was at the police, showed up at the house and killed the payments in a shootout there at the house, but she says, no. They were arrested. They were brought back, and they were in the holding cell next to her, and they hung themselves with their own bedsheets, and she says she didn’t.
She saw the walls of that room and there were creepy things written all over the walls. So much so that it still gives her the chills to this day. Then she’s done. And she leaves, right? Puts her cigarette out on her 12 inch high heels and
Stephen: walks off. And again, we see her mostly from the view of the police station.
There is a couple bits of the scene where it’s out in the parking lot towards them, so you can see both of them. But when she’s walking away and stuff, it’s all from the police station. You’re staying here. Yeah. And not going anywhere. And from a
Rhys: production standpoint, that makes all kinds of sense too.
You don’t have to worry about background noise. Or people coming up being like, Hey, you shooting a
Stephen: movie. It’s one of those things that we did it because it saved us money. We had to work within our limitations, but we did it in a way that actually improved the movie or made it the way we wanted to get it done.
Yeah. There’s a lot of great success stories that way.
Rhys: Yeah. She mentions that they sang this song too before she leaves, and she hums a little bit of it. It’s that same song that played through her radio when she called for help. There’s this slow pan through this long hallway that they love so much.
As she’s heading back up to the front. Now she’s going by, there’s a TV on in one of the adjoining rooms and she goes inside and it cuts to John Paman and Dorothea and Kitty all being questioned, interrogated. And they go into the concept of that. We talked about Paman is this higher power than the devil.
He’s been there forever. He’s the actual ruler of hell. And he comes around and he looks for people, all the pretty girls and things like that. You have Dorothea who is has her stuff together, but she’s defiant. She’s proud of her worship. And then you have Kitty who is just completely off her nut.
She is an absolute maniac. And then you have John Michael, who is he will destroy your homes, the ones who lie in your heart. And he says, I’m going to come back for you and all you
Stephen: love. And I liked it because he wasn’t that self-confident quiet. Serial possessed, serial killer type, which is common.
He was flat out there’s no questioning that it wasn’t, he didn’t even feel crazy. He really felt everything. He said, I am this demon. I am this, I’m not crazy wondering, he is probably less questionable as to what he is in the movie than some of the other stuff happening.
This is gonna
Rhys: sound horrible, but I don’t think any of these people listen to our podcast anyways. He really struck me. He speaks with the confidence of an evangelistic preacher.
Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. Where
Rhys: it’s no, this is the way it is. I have no doubt of that. You should have no doubt of that.
Because this is the truth
Stephen: Yeah. Kind of thing. Which is a nice little diversion from the normal character that’s like this in most of the horror movies and that. Yeah. The
Rhys: cackling evil guy or the whispering one, or the one who screams
Stephen: that, that seems crazy. Regardless. Yeah.
Rhys: Then Jessica, this is like my least favorite scene in the whole thing. The TVs go off and the chair’s in the room like start shooting across the room and one of them hits her and knocks her down. And I was just like, eh, you got hit by a chair, okay, I’m not in that situation. It’ll be creepy, make you startled, whatever.
As she’s getting up off the floor, the lights come back on and the phone
Stephen: rings. But those chairs, the ones that she dodges out of the way, when you see ’em in the background, somebody’s sitting in ’em, spinning in the back. Oh. Yeah I caught that on the one, but every time you’d see they’d focus on the chair spinning and moving.
It’s empty. She’d jump and then turn, and they’d have the camera, and in the background you’d see somebody in the chair spinning.
Rhys: Oh, see, I was just so annoyed by the chair attack that I wasn’t paying that much attention. And I tuned out the rest of the scene. I should’ve pushed through it. She runs up and gets the phone and it’s Monica again.
All the other girls are dead and the people won’t start singing and she starts singing it. Jess does get her to tell her last name is young and she’s 17 and they’re coming. And she’s why don’t you call 9 1 1? She’s ’cause the redial button is the only button that’s working. And that I thought was actually that’s a good excuse for why.
That’s the only number you can call. Yeah. That’s interesting. The rest of the buttons don’t work. There’s a scream and the line goes dead. Jess is upset, so she calls the other station and she gives the info to the guy. She thinks it’s the remaining members of the Paman family. ’cause it’s been a year since this all went down and there were more than just the three of them.
This guy gives her a file number to reference if the girl calls back.
Then there’s a whistling of that favorite song that you’re gonna hear so much of throughout this movie. That guy didn’t get paid enough when he came up with this song.
Stephen: It’s now a hit on radio.
Rhys: She heads down the hall to check it out. She’s checking other rooms. A door slams and she turns away and then looks back and there’s all the chairs in the room are in a giant stack.
And now she thinks it’s other police officers
Stephen: fucking with her. And I love this too, because her in that like the multiple stages of grief or whatever, when you’re scared. Denial. Yeah. You go through these different stages and she hits those and does a great job. ’cause you’d be like, okay, now I know it’s you guys.
And I was like, oh, I really liked that aspect of her character instead of it’s just all dread. Yeah. You get that brief respite. Yeah.
Rhys: She thinks this other officer’s screwing with her. She pushes a sack of chairs over and someone is buzzing to be lit in ’cause she’s locked all the doors and it’s a police officer and she accuses him of being in on the joke and he doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about.
His name is Ryan Price. He just came by to check on her and he swears on his life we find out that’s not worth much.
Stephen: Been there, done that.
Rhys: Yeah. He asked how she’s doing. There’s this kind of mild flirting going on between them. And why did he come to check on her? She thought that, it must have been something horrible, like he lost a bed or something and he’s no I wanted to stop by.
He says he worked with her dad and he was with him on the night of the payment issue when the payment shot him. Two
Stephen: of them got there early, which is really the first, it’s like the first connection of what happened to her father with this whole payment thing. They’re not separate. It’s not like his death drove her to be a cop and now she’s gonna prove herself.
It really, they are connected and it wasn’t really revealed until this point. Which I thought was great. Like you said, not an info dump at the beginning. Yeah. It’s a slow drip. And it didn’t do the opening scene where it shows the cop with the thing and the shootout and he dies and then says one year later, it, you caught it like this.
And I like that aspect of stories, ’cause they are a little different. They’re not used as much in movies. It’s a much better
Rhys: telling
Stephen: convention. It’s just, like we joke about Americans have to be hit over the head sometimes in the movies it seems, or at least that’s the conventional wisdom, we had to make it like dirt dead simple for them to understand it.
Yeah. This doesn’t do that type of convention.
Rhys: The two of them went in early. They were able to rescue you, four of the girls. But her dad was shot. He was a good cop. He would be so proud of you. She tries to get him to stay. He says he has to go and he turns to leave and there’s a giant hole in the back of his head with a little bit of brains on his shoulder.
Little
Stephen: bit. He’s got like old streamer hanging out there. But like I said, the minute he was there and talking, I’m like, oh yeah he’s something, he’s either a demon possessed or he’s just dead or, he’s not really what he seems. Yeah. Called it.
Rhys: He turns to leave and then just vanishes and she’s heading down the halls looking for him and there’s this whispering and it gets louder as she’s moving around the halls.
And you can hear the events of that night. It like builds up to where you can actually hear them dragging the people down the halls and all the screaming and everything, but there’s no visual. It’s just the sound. And she’s crouch, crouching away from it. It’s an auditory hallucination
Stephen: to her.
But they do good work with the camera, zooming the camera without her moving and changing and going back and forth.
Rhys: Yeah. The camera follows it like the action is actually happening. But it’s not, it’s just the sound. Then she turns back and there’s a figure at the end of the hall that is slid across the floor.
Someone pushes it across the floor and then it starts to float up and it turns and does the zombie shamble towards her. It’s got this bag over its face with blood on it. She
Stephen: takes, that was a great effect and it was very creepy and weird. Well done, I must
Rhys: say. Yeah. I saw a making of, and it was.
They did have a guy wrapped up on a harness and they did just from behind the wall, push him in by his ankles. And then the boom came in and it was painted out afterwards and it just went like this and just lifted him up. And once you know that, when you watch this scene, you’re like, oh, okay,
Stephen: yeah, I get it.
But it was the first real manifestation she’s seen. Everything’s pretty much been auditory with little poltergeist like activity before.
Rhys: Yeah, a lot of moving chairs, slamming doors. Yeah. She takes cover and then comes out with her gun drawn, but there’s nobody there now.
The homeless guy is begging to be let out and she’s what’s wrong? And then he like steps to the side and there are three hanging people with bags over their faces, bloodstained bags over their faces, hanging right behind him. It isn’t real. She says she steps off to the side, she’s repeating that to herself.
And then you hear girls singing this song down the hall.
She’s heading down the hall and this is the part that really bugged price was that corpse is crawling along behind her. Yes, you can hear its bones creaking and things as it goes, and she turns around, there’s nothing there. So again, to your point. That’s letting us know that it’s actually a supernatural thing.
Yeah. It’s not just her
Stephen: hallucinating. And like you said, with the sound work there’s squelching, there’s like cracking of bones while it’s moving and stuff. Yeah. And it’s really creepy. If you ever watch the Remaster of the Exorcist in like good headphones or in surround sound, the scene where she comes down the steps, backwards, upside down and all that.
It’s like a ski a, a that skittering yeah. Sound. And it’s like you hear it behind you and behind speakers only. It’s pretty freaky if you get the, do something like that.
Rhys: Oh, the famous Spanish director, horror director loves to use that kind of skittering sound. Ymo, yeah. Ermo The Toro. He puts that in all of his kind of noise.
Yeah. She finds a side room where she actually finds the girls singing the song. Now it’s not like just some ephemeral voice or anything. It’s a group of seven girls singing
Stephen: And she’s really, now she’s gone off the deep end ’cause she’s almost accepting of it. It doesn’t shock her, surprise her and she doesn’t just like, oh my God, what are you doing here?
Stand up. What? She just kinda watches stuff and very much acceptance going on.
Rhys: I think it was the officer price thing that finally did it for her. Yeah. Because she had a conversation with this thing that was there. It was talking to her. As she, as the girls are singing there’s a, there’s the two-way mirror.
You can see them reflected in there and then the girls all turn and they all have bags on their faces that are bloody, except the girls in the
Stephen: mirror are normal. Yeah. I love that scene. Yeah, that was a great effect.
Rhys: Then the door slams. A door slams and she turns to look and then turns back and the girls are all gone.
Now there’s clanking noises. She just flat out pulls the gun out. She’s not pretending anymore. The evidence room is trashed and John PA’s clothes are all laid out on the floor. And I noticed that his boots weren’t there, which is why I was like, oh, there’s the boots that the homeless guy was wearing.
Stephen: Good catch, good call.
Rhys: She calls Cohen, she goes up to the front and she calls Cohen and she’s on her last nerve. He’s like, why are you calling me? And she’s I’m seeing things. I don’t know if I can stay. And he is basically put up or shut up. Either you’re gonna stick around and finish your shift or you’re gonna quit.
She says she’ll stay. I bet he regrets that attitude at the end of this movie.
Stephen: Yes. As long as you don’t argue that he’s a part of everything. When we get there,
Rhys: I’ll talk about that actually. Okay. She checks into the hazmat team. They say they won’t be there anytime soon. Of course, she says she’s gonna wait in her squad car.
Stephen: Yeah. Which I’m like, that’s a great idea. Yeah. You just have to be on the grounds and I’m thinking, why are you going to come back in? Because I know you’re gonna come back in because a movie’s not over.
Rhys: And she’s halfway to her squad car when the phone rings and she comes running back to answer it, and it’s Monica again.
Stephen: Which again shows her dedication to the job that she wants to do a good job. She’s so conflicted and torn because they don’t teach you how to deal with supernatural beings from the underworld in cop school, yeah, that’s often. Yeah. Again, it’s not said and it’s not flat out in front of you, but she’s she’s scared, she wants outta there, but she’s, this is my job.
I gotta do it. And just by her coming back in shows that, yeah.
Rhys: And she does come in and it’s Monica, she’s escaped, she’s at Carmichael Road. Jess is calling dispatch on her cell phone. And the girl says they’re right next to her and the line drops again. She gets ahold of someone at the new station and they’re like, her name’s Monica Young.
And the guy’s she can’t be Monica Young. She was one of the girls who died at. The Paman Slaughter last year, and he suggests she’s being pranked. And when he said that, I’m like, oh my gosh. And this is where they lay the seed that is the whole red herring at the end where, oh, there was more in the family and this is the one year anniversary.
And so maybe they’re purposely fucking with you.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: But then the cop goes on to say, or you know what? After they killed themselves, things started to get weird, and they would get weirder over time the longer we were here. And that’s why we got a brand new building.
Stephen: Yeah. Nobody wants to admit it, yeah. It’s a cop thing.
Rhys: And that explains why Cohen was acting so weird at the start. Yeah, because the as the haunting is built up over the course of the year, it really gets in your head.
Stephen: Yeah. And that’s why he’s freaking out the first character and the way he acted. I definitely agree.
But it makes you think, is he part of causing this? Is it he calling these this demon back? Is he somehow part of the whole thing was his mother’s name
Rhys: Payman
Stephen: now? I’m gonna have to look that up.
Rhys: She turns away and there’s a crime si crime scene photograph of her dead father lying on the floor. She goes over and picks it up and the hallway out there is littered with these crime scene shots and she’s looking at them and the last one she looks at is officer Price lying dead.
And then when she looks back, the hallway is entirely lined and they’re all in a perfect order. Yeah. Not the kind of thing someone could do quickly. This took time. There’s this radio squelch on her shoulder, radio, a bunch of overlapping voices. The lights flicker and then all the photographs catch fire.
She doesn’t try and put the fire out?
Stephen: No. She’s let it burn. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Let this whole place burn down.
Rhys: But she seems to have passed out ’cause she opens her eyes. She’s awake on the
Stephen: floor now. It, I’m very overwhelmed at this point. That’s her whole thing.
Rhys: Her cell phone’s going off. That’s what woke her up. It’s her mom apologizing for arguing with her earlier. Your mom always calls the most convenient time. It’s then that she realizes she doesn’t have her Batman utility belt on her anymore. Yes. And that’s bad. Yeah. She gets up and heads down the hall and someone in a side room just cracks her on the back of the head with a baton, drags her down the hall into interrogating and sits her in a seat.
Now this is Birdie. She’s holding Jess’s gun and Jess is, Jess has like fully accepted it. She’s maybe you really aren’t there. Maybe I’m staring at the wall and you’re just a figment of my imagination. Yeah. And Birdie tries to be threatening. She’s I got this gun. And she is I don’t know that I believe in you.
I like this scene. Yeah. She’s I was upset when he took Dorothea and Kitty with him, but I can’t stay mad at him. And it’s been a year since his death, so she’s here to celebrate it and she does so by taking Jess’s gun and shooting herself in the head
Stephen: joining.
Rhys: Yeah, the phone is ringing. So she takes all of her stuff and the phone is not just ringing, it is like vibrating in the cradle.
Stephen: Yeah. I like that little additional touch. Yeah. That was nice.
Rhys: It’s Monica again, and this time Jess is no, you’re not. And all of the crying turns into laughter and then the whole desk starts to slide around and she looks under the desk. And there is, I’m assuming Monica, because there’s a woman under there whose face has been severely damaged.
Yeah. Like things out of place like bones have been broken. Jess crawls away into the filing shelves and while she’s back there, Monica’s, Monica, for lack of a better word, is crawling around trying to find her. And you can hear like all of the bones cracking and everything, and she moves about, yeah, the sound was amazing.
Stephen: So now our officer has crossed over from the real world into that spiritual realm that they’ve brought her completely into wherever they’ve been this whole time making noise. Yeah. She’s. No hope turn
Rhys: back and the end of this scene really forces it. ’cause Monica comes down, finds her and crawls down to her, and she flinches back and turns her head.
And then when she looks, Monica’s gone. And she’s I’m getting out. She goes to the door and tries it and the door’s locked and she can’t unlock it. So she draws her gun and shoots the glass. And price is it’s bulletproof glass. I’m like, nothing shatters like that and then suddenly heals.
Stephen: Yeah,
Rhys: that’s not a bulletproof glass thing. That’s a weird kind of mystical nonsense going on a terminal.
Stephen: Terminator.
Rhys: Yeah. Then her phone rings and she answers it, and it’s her dad, of course, she hasn’t talked to her
Stephen: dad in a year. Who would’ve? He’s dead.
Rhys: He assures her. He is real, and he is so proud of her, and she’s like completely breaking down now.
She’s I did it for you. And he is then why are you trying to leave?
Stephen: She’s oh, it’s not really her dad, it’s the demon.
Rhys: She’s I’ll stay. And he’s you have to do something about the evil in this building. Someone walks behind her, she turns around. It’s the homeless guy. She asks him how he got out.
Get on your knees, and he does his backstory. He gets on her knees. When she goes to cuff him, he flips over and his eyes are bulging out of his skull. The lights go out. She moves down the hall and there’s figures behind her. She gets to the holding and the homeless guy is hung. He’s in there, hung in cuffs, and the shoes are off his feet now.
They’re a nice stacked thing on the floor right next to ’em. Yeah. There’s graffiti all over the walls. So she’s in there and she turns around and there’s a figure behind her that she sees and it startles her. So she’s in holding again. Like she didn’t get locked in there earlier.
Stephen: She’s, brave, but she’s not learning.
Rhys: Yeah. And the actual suicides are being played out on this ephemeral like a, almost like a bridge between worlds. Like a membrane. Yeah. Yeah. It was actually a sheet it turns out, but
Stephen: oh man, it ruined it for me now.
Rhys: And basically what they do is they carve their faces up and then they put on these bags over their heads and they hung themselves.
And then instead of it just being like this movie on a membrane payments in the room with her, And then the girls are in the room with her.
Stephen: Yeah. It’s a question. Is the movie interacting with her? Is it real? Is she pulled into their world? They, or now they’re strong enough to come to our world?
It was an interesting sequence.
Rhys: Yeah. She goes out into the hall officer Price is down at the end of the hall and he says something to her and then does this whole finger gun thing and puts it in his head and the back of his head blows up. And this is where the effects happen. ’cause his eyes roll back in his head and blood pours out of his nose and mouth.
And that was literally, they’re like, how are we gonna do this? And the guy’s oh, put a hose across there. Then John Payman himself like jumps out, jump scares her. She runs to the back door. She’s repeating her oath, her mantra, trying to hold onto whatever sanity she has left. Her dad calls and he is like, they’re coming for you.
Stop them no matter what it takes. And so between the officer saying, the guy on the phone saying that, oh, they might be screwing with you because it’s been a year, and then these calls to her dad saying there’s evil here and you gotta stop it. It’s really pushing her to this part where she hits her gun out.
She goes down the hall. She’s not even I’m sure she’s scared on some level. Yeah. But in her head, she has reached that silent Hill three stage where there’s ghosts around and you know what? You just put ’em down just like anything else.
Stephen: It made me think of martyrs. It’s like that next level transcendence that they were trying to get.
Oh yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. She goes down the hall and there are people. In the building and they’re shooting at her and taunting her. But now
Stephen: this scene cracked me up a little bit ’cause it was that old like Mad magazine comedy, they’re like two feet away from each other standing up and shooting and nobody’s hitting anybody.
And I think it was logistics of the building, where the hallways were and stuff to film it. ’cause they were just feet away from each other and everybody’s bam. And nobody’s falling. Yeah. Or it’s not real bullets.
Rhys: Yeah. She, and she does reload at one point.
Yeah. But she does eventually, like her training kicks in. Yeah. And so there’s a guy there, turn, shoot bang, he’s done, he’s down. There’s another guy down there, bang hits him. She finds the third back by the back door, shoots him and he’s still alive. Buttering all the satanic stuff. She walks up and just basically executes him, shoots him in the head.
Then all of a sudden she shot from behind and it’s Sergeant Cohen. And she’s Sarge. And then all of a sudden it all plays out. This was the hazmat team. Yeah. Who just showed up late and she started shooting
Stephen: them. So had to, so she had to kill to help bring the spirits back into our world is one of the interpretations I, I took.
Yeah. ‘
Rhys: cause she’s sitting on the floor and Cohen is calling officer down and he’s like reporting it in and Jess just starts singing that song. And then at the last second you have the payments, like right next to her, and they like lean in and roll credits. And that’s the end of the
Stephen: film.
Which still I question whether Cohen was a part of the whole thing arguably or not. But again, like we said, you could watch it a couple times and probably pull out different meanings and interpretations throughout the movie. Yeah.
Rhys: I had never considered that he was, at first when he shot her, I was like, oh, he was part of it.
And then I saw that she was shooting the team. I was like, oh no, she’s a rabid dog. He had to put her down. But you mentioning maybe he was part of it and that’s why he was so upset at the start. I’m like, oh, you know what maybe that’s a good point. Yeah. Or maybe it was just the haunting really got to him and he couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Stephen: They never made a connection between him and her father.
Rhys: He does at one point in time when she’s on the phone saying she’s gotta leave, he’s the apple falls far from the tree. So he does mention
Stephen: he knew her father well, yeah. Yeah. Like I said, for me it wasn’t outstanding in that there wasn’t anything different and new too much.
But that doesn’t make it bad. And yeah it’s really well done. For what it is. It is a
Rhys: standard horror movie, but one that is done with a masterful hand at the craft.
Stephen: And that just goes to show you today’s world with all these movies premiering and Flo, they flop at the box office.
I only made 60 million. It flopped. Man. If I made 60 million, I would not consider myself a flop whatsoever. Yeah. But when you’re spending 250 million on the movie relatively, I can see that. But when you’ve got $10,000 in 10 days, you gotta do what you gotta
Rhys: do. And an abandoned building. Yeah. Full asbestos and who knows what.
Stephen: Yeah. Or my favorite is still going back to the battery. Hey, can I borrow 600 bucks? I’m gonna make a movie. You. You don’t have to have all that money with the special effects to make a good movie. Yeah. Within the limits, ask any theater major in college, or filmmaker in college you gotta do what you gotta do with what you got.
Rhys: Yeah. You make the best of what you’re given. Yeah. And sometimes those limitations actually pay off and give you a better
Stephen: product. Yeah. This turned into a full fledged movie. It’ll be interesting to watch the theater release after this. And if we really like it any better. Yeah. I’m
Rhys: a little trepidatious just because, our history with remakes, it’s at best it’s meh.
But Right. It’s like that Ty West thing. The only hurdle it has to clear is, was it competently done.
Stephen: And, but also I go for the underdog type of movie a lot. I can pull out and see the things that are masterfully done, but because it was done with a hundred dollars instead of a hundred million.
Yeah. That’s last shift. There’s last shift. Alright. So what’s next? So here’s
Rhys: the thing. I was just looking at this list and I didn’t realize it until just today. We have three movies left in the season, in the regular season. And the next one is a profession of teacher. And then the last year professions of, I did not intend to clump them together like that as far as professions goes.
But our next movie is The profession is a teacher and the movie is an, the American film cooties from
Stephen: 2015, which just by the name, it’s not gonna be as horrific as this one. Oh no,
Rhys: not at all. It’s very entertaining film.
Stephen: Good. I, we need a little break from some of the heavy duty stuff, so especially
Rhys: with the last two going into ’em.
So we need, this will be, must needed, Russ?
Stephen: Yes. All right. Ties coming up. See you later, man. Take it easy.
