KNUCKLEBONES (2016)

Studio:       Midnight Releasing
Director:    Mitch Wilson
Writer:       Mitch Wilson
Producer:  Dirk Hagen
Stars:     Julin Jean, Katie Bosacki, Cameron D. Stewart, Justin Arnold, Taylor Tippins, Mary Catherine Wells, Daniel Walker Rice, Carrie Holland, Tom Young, Jason Duffy Klemm, Tom Zembrod

Review Score:

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Summary:

A group of friends inadvertently summons a murderous demon by playing with cursed dice made from a dead man’s hand.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

A Nazi scientist oversees an occult experiment that goes haywire when murderous demon Knucklebones is summoned. Knucklebones slaughters the Nazi officers and science staff.

A woman working in a Texas garment factory follows noises she believes are coming from her son Billy. Suddenly, the woman’s bones are supernaturally broken as she screams for her son. Billy walks past multiple mutilated bodies to retrieve a set of dice made from human bones along with parchment bearing occult markings. Knucklebones attacks Billy.

40 Years Later – Neesa Avery attempts suicide after her fiancé Ryan breaks up with her. To cheer up Neesa, her best friend Samantha suggests spending a night at the reportedly haunted garment factory with their friends Kia, Adam, and Travis.

When she realizes Neesa left without telling her, Neesa’s mother calls Sheriff Anderson to help find her daughter.

While partying inside the abandoned factory, Neesa and her friends find a hidden metal box. The box contains a Nazi uniform as well as a small chest with Sumerian markings. The chest holds summoning stones made from the knucklebones of a man who died 2,000 years earlier. Accompanying papers provide instructions for playing the game to summon Knucklebones. Thinking it a lark, the five friends draw a pentagram on the floor, recite the incantations, and take turns rolling the marked bone dice according to the instructions.

After Neesa’s roll, Kia’s bones suddenly begin breaking supernaturally. Knucklebones tears his way out of Kia’s body. Everyone runs. Travis is killed by a chainsaw when he futilely tries attacking Knucklebones.

Looking to strip copper for money, junkies Andy, Star, Bobby, and Mely come to the factory. Star is impaled through her throat with a pipe. Bobby and Mely are killed while having sex. Knucklebones uses a blowtorch on Andy’s face.

Neesa, Sam, and Adam find a homeless man named Choctaw Bill. Bill tells them that he was the little boy who unwittingly summoned Knucklebones in the 1970s, prompting the factory’s closure. He goes on to suggest that Knucklebones was created as a military weapon for supernatural warfare. After Bill describes a banishment ritual that he successfully performed as a child, everyone agrees on a plan to retrieve the bone dice and try Bill’s banishment ritual once more.

Bill recovers the dice, but Knucklebones kills him. Knucklebones then uses a machete to kill Adam and seemingly kills Sam by impaling her.

Neesa runs outside and finds the sheriff. The sheriff shoots Knucklebones with his shotgun, but Knucklebones gets up and kills him. Knucklebones chases Neesa back inside.

With Neesa trapped inside the factory, Knucklebones taunts her by threatening to go after her younger sister Shelby. Knucklebones manifests at Neesa’s house and begins chasing the little girl.

Neesa uses garden shears to sever her left hand. She then makes her own set of dice from her knucklebones and uses them to perform the banishment ritual and remotely save her sister.

Still alive, Sam screams for help. Neesa rescues her.

Sometime later, Sam has a romantic rendezvous with Ryan, revealing that he had been cheating on Neesa with her best friend for several months. Having previously learned this from text messages found on Sam’s phone, Neesa intentionally unleashes Knucklebones as she now controls the demon’s power. Knucklebones tears himself out of Ryan’s body and attacks Sam.

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Review:

You might think it gets easier to write genre film reviews after you’ve done hundreds of them over a multiyear period.  It doesn’t.

In the beginning, all movies are seemingly created equal.  Whether it is a big studio star vehicle or a straight-to-video “Puppet Master” sequel, you simply say what you feel, praising what you appreciate and panning whatever makes you wince, not necessarily understanding how naïve unfiltered opinions can be.

Over time, you realize reviews are relative and start considering criticism more carefully.  Applying the same standard to both a SyFy creature feature and James Wan’s latest multiplex release doesn’t make sense because different movies serve different purposes targeting different audiences with different expectations.

In the past, I might have disliked an off-the-radar effort at a minor film festival and given it the same kind of critique I would give a production from Paramount Pictures.  However, I might recognize later that said film would never play outside of that supportive circle it was already orbiting, if it ever landed distribution at all.  I’m then left wondering, for whom is an unfavorable viewpoint intended if the niche audience existing for a movie is perfectly comfortable with amateur aesthetics and a boilerplate screenplay?

As I’ve grown savvier in separating varied tiers of production quality, I’ve phased out focusing on the level of horror that is underneath even The Asylum’s mockbusters.  This is why when I come across a movie like “Knucklebones” nowadays, I’m no longer certain what approach to take.  Do I vocalize disdain for a derivative storyline or just willfully surrender to substandard slasher silliness?  Should I care about the cast’s inability to deliver dialogue or only acknowledge how attractive they are?

Who is the likeliest audience for “Knucklebones” and what do they want for their entertainment dollar?  I’m not sure I know.

Macabre dice built from the bones of a man murdered 2,000 years earlier have the power to summon a murderous demon.  When a Nazi scientist tries doing exactly that, his occult experiment to create a supernatural weapon goes haywire by unleashing the unstoppable destructive force of “Knucklebones.”  Nazis, demons, dice, and black magic is all the explanation there is for the setup, so deal with it.

A garment factory in Texas supplies the Third Reich with their uniforms.  This part of the prologue takes place in the 1970s, when I can’t imagine Germany would have high demand for Nazi officer garb three decades removed from World War II, but deal with that detail too.  A little boy in possession of the devilish dice inadvertently conjures Knucklebones and every last employee on the premises is horribly slaughtered.

40 years later, the now-abandoned factory is the go-to urban legend for local teens and college kids looking to take a drunken dare.  Recovering from a failed suicide attempt after her fiancé broke her heart, Nessa is told by best friend Samantha that spelunking in the spooky building with a six-pack of Lone Star is precisely the sort of therapy she needs.  Into the factory go the girls with another gal pal and two guy friends.  Guess what happens when they discover the dice?

Here is the conundrum in objectively assessing “Knucklebones:”

The focal fivesome is introduced in a driving sequence set to a nondescript rock song while exterior daylight blows out the windows because of point-and-shoot camerawork.  Plot beats are a rote retread of typical teens behaving stupidly in the face of life-threatening danger, splitting up inside a haunted building even after seeing two of their friends brutally butchered.  Other common clichés include a dying victim’s bloody hand smearing a window, public domain “Night of the Living Dead” playing on a TV, and the timely arrival of four random bodies to boost the kill count and put bare breasts onscreen in a nonessential sex scene.

But by-the-book behavior on both sides of the lens is what “Knucklebones” wants, qualifying it concurrently as a failure for avoiding any attempt at mold-breaking and a success for perfectly employing cookie-cutter conventions.  Hence my dilemma in choosing the correct criteria for grading.

Although the acting isn’t describable as good, casting is mostly on the money.  Micro-budget movies often star inexperienced actors who are actually plain-faced acquaintances of the filmmaker.  Here, leading ladies Julin Jean, Katie Bosacki, and Taylor Tippins at least look like they fit in front of a camera and might make more out of heartier horror heroine roles.  The women of “Knucklebones” are eye-catchingly photogenic and that seems to be what the movie requires of them most.

Improved performances wouldn’t make much difference.  “Knucklebones” creates characters using lines like, “what if you were to travel into the future and jerk off your future self?  Would that be gay or just masturbation?”  Another person ponders if it would be politically incorrect for a Special Ed teacher to call a student “tardy” if s/he was late to class.  Again, these are stereotypically obnoxious horror movie people, yet that’s precisely who “Knucklebones” intends them to be.

Once I turned off my taste and indulged in the absurdity, “Knucklebones” became more tolerable despite its deliberate restraint on ambition.  By then I even began finding it modestly entertaining as a straightforward supernatural slasher.

Safe play suggests splitting the score down the middle at 50/100.  If a Jason meets Freddy madman stalking teens in tank tops is enough to make “Knucklebones” worth a watch, you don’t need me raining on the parade with critical comments.  And if personal preference puts you past flat fright flick fare, you’ve heard enough by now to know skipping “Knucklebones” is a decision you’ll never regret.

Review Score:  50

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