By David Dent
In the UK the term ‘white van man’ has certain laddish connotations, but in the US the phrase comes with rather more sinister associations. Warren Skeels’s The Man in the White Van, supposedly based on true events, suggests an origin of the term with a killer stalking the southern states of the USA in the 1970s.
It’s 1974. Tomboyish horse and hard rock loving schoolgirl Annie Williams (Madison Wolfe) and her more conventional fashion and boys obsessed sister Margaret (Brec Bassinger) live in a well to do family home in Miami with mum Helen (Ali Larter, who exec produced this), dad Richard (Sean Astin) and little brother Danny (Gavin Warren).
Life consists of the sisters constantly bickering and working on their first classroom crushes, Danny developing his love of weaponry via a BB gun, and mum and dad attempting to keep the peace. But something sinister is about to enter their lives and threaten the sanctity of their safe home; an anonymous white van seems to be stalking Annie, who from time to time sees a smoking figure in the garden at night. Annie’s tendency to embellish facts means that she isn’t believed when she reports this, but the family are about to find out that her fears are very real.
As the movie progresses, I got a strong sense that the killer was being depicted as a kind of prototype Michael Myers; many of the setups echo those in the ‘Halloween’ movies, and there’s even a scene where the presumed dead killer disappears in front of the cops (which isn’t really a spoiler; the film is peppered with sequences showing the killer still active in the years after the 1974 events).
The Man in the White Van takes its time before it descends into chase and capture territory. It’s never less than watchable although I was struggling to see the point of the whole thing. Skeels’s movie has been in gestation since 2021 and various plot wrinkles suggest that this may not have been a straightforward production; but really in 2023 I’m not sure we need another ‘killer-stalks-young-girls’ movie which doesn’t really add any depth or context to the events on screen.
Bloody Flicks 