The Bell Keeper (2023) - Horror Film Review

I got the wrong tone straight away for The Bell Keeper. Avoiding any type of synopsis as always, this initially looked like it was going to be a crazed redneck slasher film. What I didn't account for was how dumb this became, with characters full of corny one liners, and a vibe that was very much tongue in cheek for the most part. It also isn't a slasher, but thankfully, this went somewhere far more interesting.

Directed by Colton Tran (Snow Falls), and co-written by Joe Davison (Frost Bite) and Luke Genton (The Bone Box), this tells the familiar tale of a group of city kids heading out into redneck America in search of adventure. Falling into a box of stereotypes, you have sexist jocks, Gabriel (Capri-Antoine Vaillancourt) and Matthew (Mike Manning - The Call), their girlfriends, who include social media obsessed Megan (Alexis B. Santiago - Far Cry 5: Inside Eden's Gate), and feminist Holly (Cathy Marks - American Horror Story TV series), as well as Matthew's younger brother, the neurotic and awkward Liam (Reid Miller - Santa Jaws). They have travelled to the remote Bell Lake due to Holly wanting to make a documentary about urban legends, Liam, a late addition due to him owning a camper van which the friends have borrowed. As part of their documentary they ring an old bell located at the lake at midnight, as this had been said to open a gateway to Hell. Obviously they hadn't expected the story to be true, but unfortunately for them it kind of is. The four friends who heard the bell rang find themselves opened up for demonic possession. Liam, and Brittany (Kathleen Kenny - The Secret of Sinchanee), who is a girl in the area searching for her missing brother, inadvertently didn't hear the bell, so soon find themselves not only up against Liam's demonically possessed friends, but also a lurching mountain man, Hank (Randy Couture - The Expendables 1-3), whose fate is irretrievably connected to the curse of the bell. 

This starts off so into its genre that you even get a crazy person at a rest stop warning the friends not to head where they are planning to go. That, and the prologue that had Hank viciously dispatching two kidnapped people, led me to believe this was going to be a backwoods slasher. That was one thing that I approved of here, as it quickly becomes clear this is more of an ode to The Evil Dead series, something that this doesn't try to hide, as at one point one of the characters even directly puts out an Ash Williams one-liner. I love me some zombies and I love me some demonic possession, so the blend of the two here creates some fun moments. To be honest I was despairing at the thought of having to watch this moronic group of friends interact with each other. Gabriel turning anything anyone says into a sex joke, Matthew being generally sexist, Holly constantly pointing out the power and independence of women (reminded me a lot of Britta from sitcom Community), and Megan who was in a state of constantly being appalled at the rough conditions of the campsite. Even Liam was off-putting, his painfully self conscious ways making him seem like he had walked in off a different type of film altogether. The dialogue doesn't get better, Liam continues making nearly cringe inducing talk, with the two other protagonists joining him in their unrealistic quips and comments on their situation. All this points to the fact the characters don't find their situation serious, which is perfectly fine, I had just expected something that took itself a little bit different.

The deadites (for lack of a better term) look great, especially Holly, whose permanently fixed evil grin made her stand out from the others. It leads to some fun action sequences when the heroes battle these characters. In their deadite form, these people were infinitely more bearable than before they turn, helps that they don't speak once they have turned. There are some decent special effects, even a few decapitations, and while some of the effects did appear to be CG ones, they were still plenty passable.
Balanced against this was the goofy and very dumb plot, with various moments unconvincingly explained away, including that slight red herring of a prologue. Characters here all to readily believe some pretty wild tales, and at one point a character mentions another character's death, despite him not actually having any way of having known that, due to being somewhere else entirely when it happened!

The Bell Keeper was a very stupid movie, with a little too much bad dialogue, and a story that didn't hold up to scrutiny. It was however, also darn entertaining, after I had switched off my brain, I did find this enjoyable and fun to watch. I am always going to be up for some demonic deadite style possession. The Bell Keeper is due for release on 28th August from High Fliers Films.

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