The last movie I watched from one of my Echo Bridge budget packs (Disturbed) was a big indie stinker, so I was a little hesitant about The Legend of Sorrow Creek. My fears intensified early on in the film when we have a scene where a cop and an anthropologist are roaming through the "deep woods." It's likely just a neighborhood park - you can see traffic moving in the background. It's got a pretty poor shot-on-video look too. But once we get to our main story, I was actually kind of impressed. Despite it's obvious cheapness, The Legend of Sorrow Creek is decently acted and manages to be unsettling at times. It won't win over anyone who is on a steady diet of slickly-produced studio fare, but to me it was a pleasant surprise.
We get not one but two prologues. In our first, we're way back in the olden days, if the sepia-toned picture is any indication. It's annoyingly dark most of the time - as in most of it is just audio with a black screen. Maybe they shot it normally (there are glimpses of footage there), but it didn't look convincing enough... Anyways, you hear a woman creepily saying bible verses and it becomes apparent that she is going mad. She hangs herself while her husband knocks on the door and yells frantically. He bursts in, just yelling "my wife! my wife!" in case we couldn't figure it out.
Prologue number two takes place in the present day, and it's our afore mentioned cop/anthropologist team roaming through the woods. They conveniently have a big conversation about the history of Sorrow Creek. Way back when, it was a community of 50 or so families, and one day they just all upped and left, saying they'd rather abandon their possessions entirely than spend another night there. And local legend has it that Sorrow Creek was where the devil went though Earth into Hell when he fell from Heaven. Although with a name like Sorrow Creek, what can you expect?
Anyways, our main story. We've got four kids (in their late teens/early 20s) - two sisters (Kayla and Jesse) who grew up around Sorrow Creek, but oddly don't know the legends. With them is Kayla's boyfriend, and another boy friend. It's a nice perk that the four of them are actually pretty likable. They are just wandering around when they stumble across some ruins ("we've never seen this before," the girls exclaim), and Jesse stays behind to sketch some carvings from a tree. Big mistake. The other three return home, but Jesse never comes back! They start to panic, but then get a mysterious phone call from Jesse (on a broken phone, no less!), saying "I'm so sorry... they're all around me... AAGHHHH!" They cry for a bit (there is a lot of crying/mourning in this movie), then venture out into the night to try and track her down. They encounter some sketchy prowler who is wandering around - he's burly and scary, but doesn't engage them. Then Jesse shows up - but she's hysterical and her back is all torn up and bloody. She's alive, but barely. They bring her inside, and it becomes clear than something evil is afoot. Someone - or something - has tampered with their car (hilariously just taking out the engine and leaving it there - what they did with the rest of the car is anyone's guess). They'll need to fight back to get out alive. But how can you fight what you don't understand?
So really, The Legend of Sorrow Creek has a pretty small cast. Aside from the prologues and the occasional ghost, it's pretty much just these four folks. But things move at a decent enough pace that it's never much of a drag (as long as you can stomach a lot of crying/wailing in mourning - I'd bet a solid 7-8 minutes worth if you added it all together). The performances are all pretty solid (grading on the indie horror scale). Freya Ravensbergen is especially good as Kayla, the main non-injured sister - it's a pretty demanding role, but she really gives it her all.
The film doesn't look fantastic (although the poor shot-on-video feel seems to fade a bit once night falls), but it's well-directed and has more interesting shots than you usually get out of these sorts of things. Plus, it's pretty unrelenting in terms of how much of a downer it is. It's never a crazy tense film or anything like that, but I appreciate a film that goes for an oppressively bleak tone without resorting to anything too torturey. There are some stupid things in the script (i.e. where you question why the hell a character would do such a stupid thing), but what can you do?
The gore/etc. is okay - there doesn't seem to be a lot in the budget for the effects, but what you get is fine. Besides, it's really more of a stalker-ghost story anyways - it doesn't need a ton of gore to work. I was a little underwhelmed by the ghost design, but it's not terrible and at least it's not super-CGI.
And The Legend of Sorrow Creek doesn't overstay it's welcome at a pretty doable 74 minutes. Writer/director Micheal Penning seems well aware of just what he can accomplish using the resources at his disposal and never overreaches. The two prologues/epilogues are kind of weak, but the main story (which is the vast majority of the film) works a lot better than I expected. Not to be a broken record... you need to have a bit of indie horror love to enjoy it, but it's pretty well done.
I would recommend this film.
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