The Bell Keeper

Light, watered down horror that would appeal more to Elsie and Molly generation than seasoned hardcore fans-it wouldn't look out of place on Netflix.

Like most horrors I've seen of late its a hodgepodge of other horrors with all the stock characters in place. I was reminded of the similar horror I watched on 26/9 called ' She Came From The Woods' in its young characters being picked off by a malevolent entity but that film had humour, sympathetic characters and a witty script. It knows it's target audience and sends up the genre-this comes reasonably close.

Being Halloween today I fancied something silly and forgettable-I got it here.

Well I guess he is keeping the bell ("safe")? No pun intended - actually it is not the bell he is interested in. Just trying to use the smallest amount of sense and logic will ... well kill this movie (or the mood you should be in to watch it).

Suspension of disbelief and characters doing weird stuff in horror movies is ... well normal. But this really tries the boundaries of every and anything there is .. including dialog and more. Randy is having fun ... but the question is: will you?

If you ever ask: Hey, I would like to watch a movie, which has funny ideas and nice effects, but the editing is atrocious and the pacing is terrible and the main character has as much character as a white bread with tap water: Watch "The Bell Keeper" (2023). The editing of the dialogue is so bad, that I have to ask: Why wasn't the cutter fired? Or the main-character.

The dialogue is like this: sentence. ---2 seconds waiting--- another sentence. ---2 seconds waiting--- 3 sentences. --- waiting....

A good editor could have helped.

On the other hand: A movie with 5-10 production companies is not supposed to be good. But it could have been. Better editing, mark my words.

Not much of a plot here.. all we really need to know is that there is a cursed bell that random adventurers go and ring, and that's bad. A dude named Hank with a cauliflower ear is gonna kill those in range to hear it. There is a reason for all this, but you have to watch it to find out why. It's pretty cheap, draggy and nonsensical, but it does have just enough quirkiness to keep it mildy entertaining. We have Randy Couture, with a straight forward performance, and a quick run in with Bonnie Aarons (The Nun) being the most fun. The Liam and Brittany characters were decent, the Sheriff being the worst. Couture groupies might like this the most.

It's kind of hard to forge a decent horror film, when the concept is to make a cheap pastiche, based on an idiotic premise.

The whole thing is effectively a mash-up of Evil Dead and Knock At The Cabin - which is an act of blasphemy in itself.

And tries way too hard to force a horror-comedy angle into the storyline...which just doesn't work.

Because it makes the whole thing seem confused about what it wants to be.

Does it want to be a comedy? Or serious horror?

One can only assume they've tried to make it the best of both worlds.

However, these two different paths mix like oil and water in this example.

With the crux of the storyline coming off extremely forced at best.

It's just not a very good film.

But I guess that's what you get when you try to emulate a hack like Shyamalan.

It's not surprising that this was made by the same director who brought us the travesty that is Snow Falls (among other awful 2023 releases).

And while it might not be as bad as that film...it's still pretty bad.

2 out of 10.