Where the Devil Roams

Short review: 'Where the Devil Roams' made me really happy. To see a family making independent horror movies is terrific, but these are anything but your average home movies. This one is made with a lot of class. It's extremely dark in the early going, but it isn't afraid to throw in some moments of humour. And it's absolutely funny stuff, but the tone is so dark you can almost feel bad for laughing.

This one was described to me before going in as a slow-burn, but I'm not sure I'd agree with that assessment. There's a hell of a lot of violence and mayhem for a 'Slow-burn". Then the twisted ending is the cherry on top. I enjoyed this movie. 7/10.

And this one is out there. In my best estimate, it is as though they have pureed Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and distilled that into a feature-long Dresden Dolls music video.

Set during the Great Depression, it's a tale of ukeleles, dronecore, baby shoes, shell shock and side-show extremity regeneration. As with most of their previous offerings, the Adamses have done a lot of lore and world-crafting but leave a good deal of it unexplained. Weird things just happen in their films as if all is normal.

And I am totally fine with that.

They are making films they want to make - which is admirable in its own right.

Is it shot on a budget? Sure.

Is the acting oddly stilted? Absolutely.

But that is the charm. Like John Waters carefree guerilla cinema style. They're just making quirky horror in upstate NY with anachronistic scoring with no fear of taking things in odd directions. And that is what makes their movies interesting and different.

This one maintains that trend.

Living in a floundering carnival, a group of workers trying to make due during the Great Depression find themselves under the spell of a gruesome object in the possession of a popular act in the carnival with them which forces them into a massive killing spree to find a better life for themselves.

This was a massively disappointing and nearly unwatchable genre effort. Among it's only positive points here stem from the technical qualities on display which are genuinely impressive at capturing a haunting, dark mood. The period setting, the miserable existence working in the type of environment that looks like a soul-crushing existence, and the general lifestyle of the various participants they stumble across in the rampage they commit secures this kind of atmosphere incredibly well. Even with the way this plays out that shows the descent into madness that they fall into, with each of the family members shown to have a special liability that helps to make the plight seem all the more dynamic and ingrained into this atmospheric setting. Coupled rather nicely with the genuinely gruesome and bloody kills featured here which come about not just through the carnival acts but also the incredibly graphic murders they engage in as the sense of the curse carries out, these are enough to give this one some positives. There are some massively disappointing detriments on display with this one. The main drawback here is the absolutely draining and just plain dull pace that this one plays at where it's not really that interesting in the slightest. The tempo is a major part of this where it's just so slow-going and plodding that there's very little chances to do something interesting with a clunk storyline that doesn't warrant this type of length so it's sluggish means of carrying out the family's destructive rampage or the inner workings of the carnival where their work with the sacred heart for their deal is all just so bland and dull it's not that interesting. That factor is the other big factor here, where even though this goes for the type of in-depth analysis on the family it does very little make them endearing or worth following in this type of feature as so little of it tends to just become quite uninteresting. Added with some obvious anachronistic tendencies that give its setting away, these bring the film down overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

This would've been a lot better as a short film and hopefully that concise format would've actually gotten the point of it across. It was painful to sit through and the only way I got through it was by laughing at how absurdly serious they were taking themselves throughout the entire film. Their cinematography has improved since Hellbender and I enjoyed the atmospheric music, but other than those two elements, I have nothing positive to say about this film. As a horror fan and someone who generally loves things to do with carnival settings, I would not recommend this film. If you really want to see it, wait until it comes into a streaming service so you're not paying any extra for it.

WHERE THE DEVIL ROAMS is another creepy film from The Adams clan. Set during the Great Depression era, we are taken along with a family of three carnival performers (John Adams, Toby Poser, and Zelda Adams), as they embark on their spree of grisly murder.

Known for making the best of meager funds, this movie is no exception. As usual, the story is unique and gruesome, and the practical gore effects are well-realized. It's cool to see a family of filmmakers put together such a dark genre effort. The music -also performed by the Adamses- is a sort of ethereal sounding gloom-metal that might not have been around in the 1930s, but fits the overall mood of the film.

Recommended for those who appreciate low-budget horror movies that are quite out of the ordinary...