I heard good things about The Void since last year and most likely around the time it was originally released.  Word was this was a film that evoked the works of John Carpenter and H. P. Lovecraft and that sort of stuff is most surely in my wheelhouse.

Here’s the movie’s trailer: Not too bad looking and some of the other reviews presented within that trailer are pretty strong, no?

Alas…

Look, I didn’t hate the film.  It was pretty well done and the acting, while not always uniformly great by all participants -nor terrible, it should be noted- nonetheless presented some very good practical (gore) effects.

But the story…jeeze.

A number of years ago I went to a local -and relatively small- Czech club for an event.  The highlight of the event was a Czech band that emulated and performed -quite excellently- early Beatles music.  The four members of the band looked uncannily like John, Paul, George, and Ringo during their earlier years, complete with mop tops and dressed in dark suits ala Hard Day’s Night.  As I said before, their performance was excellent and their voices and use of musical instruments were incredibly near to what The Beatles did back in their earlier years.

So good were they that I wondered why they hadn’t tried to do their own music instead of covering The Beatles so damn well.

Watching The Void was sorta/kinda like watching those pseudo-Beatles.

The Void cribs (or, if you’re less tolerant, rips off) the general plot/set-up of John Carpenter’s first big hit, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), mixes it with some of the monster effects of his 1982 classic The Thing, features a conclusion that is awfully similar to the conclusion of his 1987 film Prince Of Darkness, while also featuring a villain/cult and an alternate world setting which, once it shows up, feels an awful lot like stuff found in Clive Barker films like 1987’s Hellraiser.

Of course, John Carpenter was inspired by other works as well.  So too Clive Barker.  They both clearly love the works of H. P. Lovecraft and there are elements of it in their works.  In the case of John Carpenter, one can argue Assault on Precinct 13 itself was inspired by such “siege” films as the original Night of the Living Dead or Gunga Din.

The thing is that at least John Carpenter and Clive Barker took those inspirations and created something interesting and clever in its own way, the same of which cannot be said of The Void.  Too much was taken directly from these listed works and little new was added to the mix.

Having said that, the movie’s first 20 or so minutes are easily its best.

The Void starts with a genuinely creepy and horrifying shoot up in a home in the woods in the dead of the night.  We have a weird father/son (Daniel Fathers, Mik Byskov) pair shoot up said home and quite nastily murder one of its occupants, a fleeing woman.  However, a young man also manages to get away and, later that night, is spotted by deputy Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole).

The man is near hysterical and unresponsive when Carter finds him.  He takes the man to the nearest hospital which happens to be where his wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe) works.  We quickly find that things aren’t the greatest between husband and wife.  The hospital, like the previously mentioned Precinct 13, is lightly staffed and has only two patients, a very pregnant woman in the outpatient waiting area accompanied by her father (or was it grandfather?  I’m not certain), and a young man who is spending the night in a hospital bed.

To make a long story short, the small group soon finds they’re under siege by what appear to be cultists (again, very much like Precinct 13), while within the hospital eerie secrets are eventually revealed and corpses tend to not stay still.

In sum, The Void is a well made film with good acting and effects which, unfortunately, features a story that to this viewer relied a little -hell, too much– on other movies without bringing enough of its own interesting new material to the table, which is a shame.

Therefore it is difficult for me to recommend The Void unless you’re willing to ignore the way it takes from so many other, better films.

So, if you’re in the mood for some creepy thrills, rather than checking out The Void you may want to catch the films I’ve listed above and, especially, these three whose trailers I present below…