DEAD VOICES (2020)

Studio:      High Octane Pictures
Director:    William Butler
Writer:      Jacob Kyle Young
Producer:  Jacob Kyle Young, Melissa Vitello
Stars:     Jacob Kyle Young, Lochlyn Munro, Angelica Briones, Lauren Albo, Jack Buckley, Cody Anderson, Naama Silver

Review Score:

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Summary:

Two sisters hire a psychic medium to contact a dead boyfriend and end up immersed in a satanic mystery at a woodland cabin.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

January 5, 2018 – Emily Rodriguez records her sister Sara’s boyfriend Lucas proposing to Sara. Sara unexpectedly turns down the proposal because she does not want to be a military wife.

July 14, 2019 – Emily introduces her college documentary project titled ‘Dead Voices,’ in which the sisters plan to find a psychic medium who can contact Lucas, who went missing and presumably died in Iraq.

Psychic medium Paul Shipman comes to the house. Paul detects a presence that warns, “don’t let them go.” Paul leaves abruptly.

Psychic medium Mike comes to the house next. Mike claims to see an explosion, but says Lucas wasn’t there and may still be alive. Mike describes a mountain location that the sisters identify as Lucas’s family ranch near Yosemite. Emily and Sara decide to go there to search for clues. On his way to his car, a passerby recognizes Mike as someone named Patrick, but Mike blows her off.

Mike meets the sisters at Lucas’s cabin. Emily and Sara occasionally glimpse a shadowy figure. They also occasionally hear inhuman sounds outside. Mike enters various trances and disappears repeatedly. The sisters find a photo with the faces of Lucas’s parents scratched out. Other odd events occur.

Emily and Sara find a whiteboard with cryptic messages. Mike speculates Lucas committed himself to Satan when he identifies the writing as ‘The Demon’s Creed.’ Mike also detects an energy suggesting two people were cruelly murdered in the cabin.

With her mind cracking due to running out of psychiatric medication, Sara vows to save Lucas. Sara wipes off the whiteboard before storming away alone.

Emily and Mike have sex after drinking whiskey together. Mike disappears again during the night. While looking for Mike, Emily finds a satanic grimoire with Lucas’s name written inside.

Emily finds her sister entranced in the woods. Another strange wail frightens the sisters back to the cabin where they find Mike in a psychic trance. Complaining of voices that won’t stop, Mike claims the two people murdered were Lucas’s parents, whom Lucas sacrificed to Lucifer. Sara sees that the whiteboard messages were mysteriously rewritten.

Mike gives Sara a pill. Mike and Sara start kissing before Mike chokes Sara unconscious. Someone then records himself stalking Emily in her bed with a knife.

The next day, Sara records a confessional video in which she insists Lucas was in her bedroom. Someone pulls Sara, who also has cuts on her back, offscreen.

Emily finds her sister attacking Mike in a rage. Sara runs outside and Emily follows after her. Sara tells Emily she saw Lucas. She also warns Emily that Mike isn’t who he says he is and claims he is manipulating them.

Emily falls and knocks herself unconscious on a rock. Someone drags Emily offscreen.

In Mike’s car, Sara discovers papers identifying Mike as Patrick Anders. Sara matches the name to a dogtag she previously found. She also finds a remote control that triggers the strange sounds she heard and remotely opens cabin doors.

Sara returns to the cabin where she finds Patrick with Emily’s severed head and dismembered body. Suffering from PTSD, Patrick reveals himself as a soldier who served with Lucas. He and Lucas were captured and held prisoner for six months in Iraq after Lucas triggered an IED. Lucas and Patrick blamed Sara for the emotional distress that distracted Lucas when he was performing a sweep for explosives. Lucas and Patrick created the cabin mystery as an elaborate revenge plot.

Lucas enters and snaps Sara’s neck. Lucas and Patrick then plot to target Patrick’s brother and his wife Crystal next, because Crystal was previously engaged to Patrick before he went missing.

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Review:

Sara broke her boyfriend Lucas’s heart when she turned down his marriage proposal in 2018. Adding unintentional insult to humiliating injury, Sara’s sister Emily recorded the awkward event under the presumption it wouldn’t have an unhappy ending.

Sara simply couldn’t bring herself to become a military wife. Her worst fears were validated the following year when an IED explosion left Lucas presumed dead in Iraq. Sara moved on with a new beau, but Emily intends to open old wounds by trying to literally revisit old ghosts for a college project.

With her sister’s reluctant permission, Emily turns on her camera and starts searching for a medium who can find out what happened to Lucas. After a seeming psychic strikeout with Paul, Emily hits apparent paydirt with Mike. Unknown voices tell Mike that Lucas might not be dead after all, and the mystery of his whereabouts could be connected to a remote family ranch. Things get weirder when Emily, Mike, and Sara head out to that location and find signs of Satanism as well as strange shrieks and shadows in the night. Whatever Lucas may have been involved in, it now has the sisters in its clutches too.

Unless a shotgun wedding between the dusty subgenres of cabin in the woods creeper and “found footage” lights your cigar, you won’t need a crystal ball to predict “Dead Voices” will bring you an evening of unfulfilling entertainment. The first “uh oh” premonition arrives immediately after opening logos when a girl who looks like she’s still in high school appears as a network news anchor to tell us about the two missing sisters. Trust me when I tell you believability does not get any better from here.

Headlines accompanying press for “Dead Voices” boast about a ‘Riverdale’ star in the cast. No, not Camila Mendes, Cole Sprouse, or another one of the pinup-perfect young heartthrobs. That star is Lochlyn Munro, a.k.a. Betty Cooper’s father Hal, taking the kind of in-and-out cameo usually reserved for a genre movie mercenary like Eric Roberts or Malcolm McDowell.

Munro appears onscreen for only three minutes. His two brief scenes occur days apart, maybe months, yet he’s wearing the same shirt both times, erasing any doubt about him filming his footage as fast as possible before cutting and running. I can’t be sure if his ham sandwich performance is a result of not giving a spit since he’s slumming it in DTV horror, or if he genuinely thinks a psychic in a trance should cartoonily contort like Ace Ventura sticking his tongue in a bug zapper. In a meta moment, Munro’s inconsequential character then abruptly says, “I need to leave” and exits permanently just 10 minutes into the movie. So if Lochlyn Munro’s prominent placement as a supposedly featured player attracts you to “Dead Voices,” you’re going to be doubly pissed at the film’s misleading marketing.

What scant kind words there are for “Dead Voices” can be volleyed directly at Lauren Albo and Angelica Briones, who play sisters Emily and Sara. Both actresses have inviting presences, but it’s Briones who impresses most with a surprising ability to cry on cue in scenes that exhibit authentic acting ability. It’s easy to roll cynical eyes at her tear-stained sniffles, yet Briones puts up an infinitely more impassioned performance than viewers are used to seeing in this brand of B-movie. Oftentimes she’s too impassioned, though that can be pinned on the director for not guiding Briones to use her tools correctly. She and Albo don’t salvage “Dead Voices” singlehandedly, but they do bring a dim light to its disappointing darkness.

Even Katharine Hepburn couldn’t mold a diamond out of the script’s towering piles of clichéd coal. Jacob Kyle Young wrote the screenplay. He also plays medium Mike, making it more than a little suspicious that Mike has a sex session with each sister, conveniently setting up Young to make out with both women.

The movie’s biggest blunder comes in the setup stage when Mike leaves Emily and Sara’s home. In a sequence so forcibly faked it would make a kindergarten drama teacher cringe, a woman just happens to be driving by at the moment Mike steps out the door. The curious woman calls out, “Patrick?” Mike shrugs her off with, “Sorry babe, wrong guy” and walks away as she continues calling the other name.

Emily thinks nothing of the odd encounter, but we now know Mike isn’t who he says he is. There must be one hundred less obvious ways to drop this clue about Mike’s true identity without the improbable coincidence of a random driver recognizing him in a five-second window. What’s worse, “Dead Voices” doesn’t need to give us this information at all. Its telegraphed twist might actually deliver a mild shock if the movie wasn’t playing with all of its cards facing the audience.

Snipping that ham-fisted scene wouldn’t solve countless other issues. “Dead Voices” dates itself by drowning in “found footage” staples that rusted 20 years ago including video glitches, recording a tearful confession in selfie view, repeatedly calling someone’s name while wandering the woods, a camera that frames properly no matter where it haphazardly drops, lame lines like “(My psychic ability) may be a gift, but it’s also a curse,” and an audience left constantly wondering, “why are they still filming?” Horror is so far past everything “Dead Voices” has to offer, the movie may as well tie a tag around its own toe.

Review Score: 30

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