Sacrament (UK DVD)
Gareth Jones
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Starring Avery Pfeiffer, Troy Ford, Cassandra Hierholzer, Brittany Badali, Hugo Matz
Directed by Shawn Ewert
A group of fun-loving friends on the way to Spring Break celebrations find themselves in a heap of trouble when they stop overnight in a bible belt Texas town. Featuring a gay couple, an interracial couple, and boys and girls of all shapes and sizes, the friends are a smorgasbord of today’s open, diverse and inclusive society – sure to end up at loggerheads with the fundamental zealots in the town of Middle Spring.
Oh… and the townsfolk aren’t just insanely religious – they’re also cannibals who love nothing more than some good BBQ as they praise the Lord by consuming the flesh and blood of those they deem sinners.
Shawn Ewert’s Sacrament is a low-budget indie flick that looks and feels very much like a low-budget indie flick. The premise has little to offer that we haven’t seen many times before – teens hunted by cannibal hicks in a backwards town, ending up one by one making their own personal additions to the local food supply. Where Ewert’s film stands apart is in its approach to the young people themselves – as mentioned, they’re a very diverse group, led by gay couple Blake (Pfeiffer) and Lee (Ford), and make for a solid change from the usual group of beautiful young All-American things that populate this type of flick on the higher budget end nowadays.
In most aspects, Sacrament feels like an amateur effort – but not so much as to be off-putting. First time feature director Ewert shows plenty of promise, but needs to focus on the technical aspects of his film construction. The editing in Sacrament, in particular, is frequently out of step – forcing odd beats into the visuals and unnecessarily extending some scenes far beyond usefulness. This same sense of amateur promise extends to the cast, who for the most part appear to be putting everything that they can into it, but lack either the experience or the direction to truly pull it off. Pfeiffer and Ford are standouts (as is the late Marilyn Burns in her last film role, putting everyone else to shame with only a few minutes of screen time) and do a decent job of carrying the film – but the dialogue rarely sounds anything more than read straight from a script.
Speaking of script, the one fuelling Sacrament seems to want to tell a story of tainted dynasty and historic terrors surrounding the town of Middle Spring, but finds itself lacking clarity in just what it’s trying to tell us or how the internal politics of this place actually works. Subplots involving a crazy hospital patient and another victim attempting to escape the town crop up periodically, but ultimately amount to nothing in the grand scheme of things. If they aren’t driving the story in any way, they have no reason to be there – and all they do in this case is pad out the runtime and bog down the narrative.
Gore fans should find enough to like here, though, with lots of the red stuff flung around, guts spilled, and more than a few impressive practical effects to be seen… though they don’t make up for Sacrament‘s primary failing: it just isn’t scary. Kill scenes are largely devoid of tension, relying more on an attempt at shock tactics that rarely work as expected. Rather than gripping with a sense of fear and danger, Sacrament merely unfolds before your eyes – a time-waster that, despite the multitude of problems it carries along the way, isn’t actually a total waste of time.
Left Films bring Sacrament to UK DVD with quite the pack of special features. We have the original short film which led to the feature’s creation, a bunch of on-set cast and crew interviews, a selection of audition tapes for the main cast, some (pretty much throwaway) deleted scenes, footage of the casting of actor Cory W. Ahre’s arm for effects work, a couple of trailers for the film (plus other Left Films releases) and a feature commentary with director Ewart and various cast and crew. That’s a pretty impressive amount of content for a small independent flick such as this.
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Film
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Special Features
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