I've been meaning to watch The Void all year so when it popped up on Shudder I just had to give it a watch. This was a bit of a hotchpotch one in that it reminded me of a lot of different films, there were traces of Hellraiser and The Thing in its creature design, while the gist of the plot drew many similarities with Turkish horror Baskin, The Beyond, and even Event Horizon.
One night Policeman Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) finds an injured man by the side of the road out in the middle of nowhere and so takes him to the small local hospital where his ex wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe) works. He soon finds out that the hospital has been surrounded by white robed cultists who seem determined to let no one leave, while inside people are transforming into hideous monsters. After Allison goes missing, Daniel, the injured man, and a vengeance seeking father and son head into the basement where it seems she has gone, however this basement may well be a gateway to Hell...
The special effects for The Void are fantastic, I loved all the gruesome monster mutations that seemed like a cross between the Necromorphs from video game Dead Space and The Thing from that film. These are coated in slime, have writhing tentacles and additional limbs and heads growing out from their cancerous mass, with it seeming the original host has been assimilated . I loved these practical special effects with the camera and lighting helping to make these seem chaotic with much of the monsters hidden in darkness, or with close up shots. The set design is another aspect of this that added to the atmosphere with some effective looking locations in the basement of the hospital. This was where the similarities with Baskin come to the fore though, in that film a bunch of policeman find a gateway to Hell in the basement of an abandoned building, here a policeman finds a gateway to Hell in the basement of a pretty much deserted hospital. As such when we start seeing random creatures scuttling around and corpses hanging from ropes I was immediately reminded of similar scenes there.
