Control Group, The (2014)
Matt Boiselle
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Starring Brad Dourif, Monique Candelaria, Ross Destiche, Jenna Enemy
Directed by Paul Hurd
Along the lines of those movies that you’ve set your eyes on for close to an hour and a half and end up wondering, “What the HELL did I just see?,” Peter Hurd’s latest release, The Control Group, fits right in under that classification. I’m still attempting to decipher what I subjected my peepers to, and there is a certain sense of unforgiving that my orbital scanners have relayed to me. In other words, this was pretty brutal to watch, and I could most certainly think of less painful ways to spend 81 minutes… say, punching myself in the junk repeatedly until I’m numb?
Now, whether or not anyone decides to read my vivisection of this particular photoplay is entirely up to them; however, for the small contingent that will waste their time wading through my review, first of all, THANK YOU, and secondly, save yourself from this film.
I’d also like to offer sincere congratulations to Paul Hurd for putting this movie out there – his adoration for the horror genre is a welcome breeze to an otherwise stagnant air flow in the biz today, and while the idea behind the film was pretty solid, it was the performances that murdered it. Brad Dourif takes the lead here as a focused (and slightly off-kilter) persona known as Dr. Broward – his techniques are solid, and his thesis is concrete. Yet, he has somewhat of an iron-fist complex: unwilling to relinquish his hold upon those who are under him. All in all, he’s the lone standout performance here. Taso Stavrakis, who has been a Romero staple in the past, serves his role admirably (although it’s a short performance) as Agent Torrez, an agency mercenary assisting in the doc’s experiments.
All right, enough of the particulars; let’s delve into this jumble of what could have been, shall we?
The movie begins with the lead protagonist, Jack (Ross Destiche), waking up from sedation in an abandoned insane asylum with no recollection of how he got there. Slowly after awakening, he meets up with four other acquaintances (I won’t call them friends, as it was somewhat of a sticking point that they all kept mentioning that they weren’t), and together they attempt to figure out just how they all ended up in this labyrinth of hallways. The quintet of melancholy is rounded out by a varied mix of personas (and levels of annoyance): Grant, a controlling boyfriend to tougher-than-nails Vanessa; Cory, who is Jack’s college roommate; and Jaime, the “spiritually-enlightened” dreamer… have a few more mushrooms, will ya? They are under watch by Dr. Broward and a team of “agency” workers that had a hand in getting the five youths to the designated experiment location. The current scenes are weaved with backstories about each specific character – while some provide a deeper look at each identity, some were useless to watch and didn’t necessarily serve a purpose other than to fill time.
Each of the five at different intervals undergoes instances of things that frighten them (in a hallucinatory fashion), and hooded “crows” patrol each hallway (hired soldiers), acting as an added measure of mind manipulation. When the first member of the group is led to death in a trance-like state, the demented doc and his team rush to collect all of the pertinent info (the apparent usage of the drug’s effect will be for overseas interrogation purposes), and after an unforeseen supernatural force possesses the cadavers, it takes all shapes and sizes to band together in order for anyone to evade the slaughter and escape freely.
This is where things get messy (and I’m not talking about the gore). While the situations get more intense, and the performances would need a boost, they seem to take a precipitous downslide right into atrociousness. To call some of these individual doings “hokey” would be a severe understatement. Does anyone have the phone number for Overactors Anonymous? Let me return to the gore for a second: While certain acting spots can be pushed to unrealistic limits, so can the believability of gore, and when a character’s guts are spilled onto the floor after the simple twist of a knife into their stomach… let’s just say that the word “pedantic” fits this position consummately.
Hurd sets up a nice premise, decent locale, and interesting government cover-up backstory, but it’s ultimately dragged to its demise by a collection of bad acting stances. I’ll be willing to throw up a star and a half here for the setup alone, but control should conclusively be used to skip this “group.”
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Film
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