GEHENNA: WHERE DEATH LIVES (2016)

Studio:       Uncork’d Entertainment
Director:    Hiroshi Katagiri
Writer:       Bradley A. Palmer, Nathan Long, Hiroshi Katagiri
Producer:  Koodae Kim
Stars:     Justin Gordon, Eva Swan, Simon Phillips, Matthew Edward Hegstrom, Sean Sprawling, Lance Henriksen, Doug Jones

Review Score:

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Summary:

Resort developers surveying land in Saipan become trapped in a cursed bunker when they disturb an ancient burial site.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Saipan 1670 – In an underground chamber, native villagers perform a blood ritual on Don Rodrigo, a captured Spanish commander. A shaman cuts off Don Rodrigo’s face.

In the present, building developer Paulina arrives in Saipan to survey a prospective area for a new resort. After phoning her boss Morgan, Paulina gathers her architectural consultant Tyler and photographer Dave. Business broker Alan and his local guide Pepe escort everyone to the location.

Paulina learns that natives are protesting the sale of the land because it sits on sacred ground that is reportedly cursed. Outside a bunker on the land, the group encounters a man praying while wearing Don Rodrigo’s mummified face as a mask. The man drops a Bojobo doll on the ground as Alan forces him to leave.

Paulina insists that they investigate the bunker. Dave collects the Bojobo doll before going inside.

In the bunker, Paulina and the others find several withered corpses and an emaciated old man. The old man approaches Alan, who violently pushes him into a wall. The old man calls Alan by name and cryptically warns him, “you must die first.” The old man also says “your fault” to Paulina before dropping dead.

An earthquake suddenly shakes the bunker as the lights go out. When they recover, everyone discovers that they have inexplicably traveled back in time to World War II and are locked inside the bunker.

Alan takes Pepe in search of another exit. The two men find a radio with labels written in Japanese.

Tyler finds a diary written by a Japanese officer that he shows to Paulina. Diary entries mention making amends for sins in order to make nightmares stop.

Tyler, Paulina, and Dave encounter the despondent Japanese officer who wrote the diary. Following a cryptic verbal exchange, the officer suddenly shoots himself with a pistol.

Alan and Pepe take Paulina, Tyler, and Dave to the radio. Over the radio, Tyler hears an imperial order state that civilians who commit suicide receive the same spiritual status as soldiers who die in battle. Tyler also hears a voice say, “kill her.”

Left alone, Pepe finds another Bojobo doll in the dead officer’s pocket. Pepe confronts a ghoulish vision of his dead mother who compels Pepe to cut himself with the officer’s combat knife.

Paulina, Tyler, Dave, and Alan explore a chamber that Dave recognizes from a folklore book as a burial site for ancient chiefs. From the cave paintings, Dave explains that two Bojobo dolls held the spirits of a chief and his bride, whose bond was eternal. The bride was kept above while the chief was buried below. By separating the two, a curse was created. The chief transferred his torment onto Don Rodrigo, who had tortured natives during the Spanish colonization.

Dave dislocates his leg when he confronts a frightening vision of his dead sister Claire, whose accidental death he blames he himself for. Paulina stays with Dave after escorting him back to a bunk while Tyler and Alan continue exploring. Tyler and Alan briefly encounter Pepe, who appears entranced with bloody gashes all over his torso.

Dave experiences a vision of his dead sister choking him. Afterward, Dave gives Paulina the female Bojobo doll he recovered outside. Dave tells her that according to the cave paintings, the doll must be reunited with its male counterpart if they are to find a way out. Paulina takes the doll to Tyler.

Having gone off alone, Alan encounters a vision of the old man he pushed into the wall. Alan also confronts Pepe once more before seeing the old man yet again.

Paulina confronts a vision of her dead son Doug, who drowned six years earlier when Paulina wasn’t paying attention. Tyler helps Paulina recover. Alan enters the room. Tyler attacks Alan when Alan makes disparaging comments about Paulina, but Alan’s words turn out to have been a hallucination.

Tyler, Paulina, and Alan consult the Japanese officer’s diary. The diary tells of a soldier named Kato who began behaving irrationally in the bunker. Kato broke through a wall where the officer found the male Bojobo doll hidden. The Japanese soldiers also found a passageway to “Gehenna,” the place where the curse originated. There, they confronted a mummy-like creature who said “only one can live” in Spanish.

The soldiers became trapped in the bunker. The officer killed Kato and the others as they went insane. The last thing the officer said was that he would commit suicide to make amends for his life. However, he found that killing himself was not amends enough and he was still cursed to live in his hell alone.

Alan warns that Pepe similarly lost his mind. Alan goes off alone to find him. Paulina reasons that she and Tyler must find the room where the curse originated.

Dave encounters another terrifying vision of Claire. Paulina and Tyler find Dave with his throat torn open.

Tyler is terrified by a vision of a blonde woman with a bullet hole in her forehead. Paulina encounters her dead son again.

Alan returns to stab Tyler. Alan tells Paulina he is going to ensure he becomes the sole survivor. Paulina flees.

Paulina encounters Pepe, who is still entranced. Paulina gives Pepe the female Bojobo doll. Pepe pulls out the male doll and begins putting them together when Alan strikes him with a shovel from behind. Pepe decapitates the dolls in anger. Alan viciously beats Pepe with the shovel before stabbing him to death. Paulina flees back to the bunker.

Paulina recovers the Japanese officer’s pistol and shoots Alan in his stomach. Having recovered from Alan’s stabbing, Tyler returns to stop Paulina from shooting Alan a second time. Tyler repeats, “only one can live.” After kissing, Paulina and Tyler express their love for each other. Tyler takes the pistol and points it at Alan. Unexpectedly, Tyler shoots Paulina instead, revealing she was the vision that haunted Tyler earlier.

Still dying from his stab wound, Tyler tries telling Alan that the person who survives suffers a worse fate than those who die. Before dropping dead, Tyler intimates that the dead bodies they found 70 years in the future were actually their own.

With Tyler’s death, Alan’s bullet wound suddenly heals. Alan watches the video shot by Dave, which Tyler had also seen, and realizes Tyler was telling the truth about the time paradox. The lights in the bunker go out as Tyler realizes he is doomed to become the emaciated old man he attacked earlier.

In a coda, Morgan prepares to go to Saipan in search of Paulina.

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Review:

Were someone to ask my opinion of “Gehenna: Where Death Lives” in civilian circumstances, I’d mumble “meh” and move on.  One of the challenges of being a critic however, is I’m required to fill out a full-length review even when additional words are unwarranted.  It’s not that “Gehenna: Where Death Lives” is necessarily poor by low-budget DTV standards.  It’s simply so middle-of-the-road that little else needs to be said.

Look at the opening credits or the film’s poster art and you’ll notice prominent placement for Lance Henriksen and Doug Jones.  These two genre icons have had their names dropped in so much B-movie muck that their vaunted cameos are clues “Gehenna’s” producers don’t know they have next to no value anymore.

Henriksen in particular has been slumming it with “get in, get out” gigs for ages, though this might be his most laughably shoehorned appearance yet.  You could knock me over with the decimal point in his paycheck if Henriksen’s needless inclusion here clocks in at longer than 60 seconds.  Part of me cynically wonders if Henriksen’s single scene was intentionally written to put him on one end of a call so he could phone in a performance literally instead of just figuratively.  The other part of me wonders if the production still had to pay Henriksen’s full day rate, even though he could not possibly have been on set more than 15 minutes, which includes trips to the honey wagon as well as the craft services table. 

I love Lance, but seriously, this has to stop being his reputation.  Incidentally, if you can outlast the end credits, Henriksen returns to send what integrity remains for himself and the movie right out the window with one of the campiest codas conceivable.

Henriksen’s employee Paulina (I just had to look up this key character’s name – that’s how much of an impression the movie makes) has landed in Saipan to scout a location for a resort development.  The story doesn’t need her to, but she checks in with Lance via the aforementioned phone call to let him know she arrived.  Lance gives her an “atta girl,” hangs up, and rushes off to whatever other monster movie one-and-done he can squeeze in before lunch, probably grabbing another handful of Red Vines “to go” on his way out.

Paulina meanwhile, grabs her architect Tyler, photographer Dave, and sets out for the site with Alan, the man brokering the deal, and Alan’s local guide Pepe. We are going to need a native to spit up exposition about local lore and superstitions after all.

The group gathers outside an unusual bunker while surveying the area.  If they knew they were in a horror movie, they’d know to get out of there asap after encountering protests over the disturbance of a sacred ancient burial site.  Even if one were to ignore the natives, the creepy old shaman wearing a mask of human flesh and praying with a voodoo doll should be additionally ample evidence that evil lies ahead.

Of course, Paulina and the others enter the old bunker anyway.  I’ve already made this longer than necessary so long story short, Paulina and pals find several shriveled corpses and another mysterious old man before a sudden earthquake knocks out the lights.  When they recover, the quintet discovers the dead bodies disappeared as they have inexplicably been transported to World War II, and are trapped inside the underground shelter.

“Gehenna” uses this premise for a claustrophobic paranoia thriller that has a hard time conveying claustrophobia, paranoia, or thrills because its budget only buys the look of a basic cable TV show.  Bright natural light washes act one exteriors with flat cinematography forbidding any face to have a shadow.  Interiors go in an opposite direction of darkness, yet are still unable to hide seams in the set.  The five characters, who range in stereotype from arrogant alpha male to culturally insensitive comic relief, do circuitous laps around a kitchen-sized stage dressed, redressed, and then dressed again to look like different corners of a cave seemingly pulled from “Land of the Lost’s” dumpster.

Ribbing aside, the effort is as estimable as can be expected from a crew using a nickel for every dollar required.  But if you want to immerse yourself in the movie’s vaguely “Twilight Zone”-ish tale, your imagination has to forgive a lot of flaws, because hammy dialogue and hammier acting aren’t up to making that magic happen.

“Gehenna: Where Death Lives” is the first feature from director Hiroshi Katagiri, a longtime effects artist whose copious credits include films from John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro, and Steven Spielberg.  Unsurprisingly, brief glimpses of this movie’s monsters are “Gehenna’s” bread and butter.  Beyond that, Katagiri sits at the low end of the learning curve in terms of pacing the right rhythm, culling convincing performances, and tying atmosphere together.

A brief Saipan history lesson, licks of unique legends, and a fiendish final revelation flavor fiction enough to prevent blandness from bringing the film all the way down.  If the screenplay didn’t force five folks confined in a corridor to nonsensically wander away from one another repeatedly, perhaps improved plot progression would lengthen the story’s legs.  What we see is instead what we get with “Gehenna: Where Death Lives,” and what we get is a mediocre motion picture.  Like I said, “meh.”

NOTE: There is a post-credits scene.

Review Score:  50

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