By Simon Thompson
Watching Harley Wallen’s Beneath Us All is an experience that I would compare to an awkward encounter with a tedious relative that you always avoid, out of fear of being trapped in a room with them while they show you their air fix scrapbook complete with captions that have levels of paragraph density that would frighten Herman Melville.
Beneath Us All has a glacially paced narrative, strung together by scenes and scenarios that you’ve seen executed far more competently in other movies and tv shows, and populated by characters more predictable than the result of a Russian election.
The story of Beneath Us All focuses on Julie, ( Angelina Danielle Cama), a seventeen year old girl in an abusive foster home who comes across a strange artefact in the woods near the house. Investigating the artefact further she accidentally activates it, awakening a severely injured centuries old Viking vampire named Frey, ( Yan Birch) who she decides to help by hiding him in a farmhouse.
While centuries old vampires are being resurrected however, the b and c plots get under way, one involving a local social worker named Rebecca ( Katti Wallen) investigating Julie’s situation and the other centring around Julie’s foster-father Todd, ( Sean Whalen), dealing with his sizeable gambling debt to a seedy group of gangsters so generic it looks like they were calibrated by A.I.
From describing the plot of Beneath Us All it is easy to diagnose the main problem with Brett Miller’s script, which is that the narrative of the movie is essentially three scenarios which could all be feature length films themselves rather than focusing on one. The other problem is that both the main narrative and the two sub-plots are more soporific than a Naruto filler arc, especially when it comes to Rebecca’s story which can be boiled down to her looking sad and exhausted, and the other characters pointing out that she looks sad and exhausted almost every thirty seconds.
To be fair to Harley Wallen, however, Beneath Us All is actually a well-directed movie. Wallen has a good eye for colour and camera placement, and has a keen sense of knowing when to cut and when to let a shot linger just for a second longer. What really lets Beneath Us All down is Brett Miller’s script, which takes a cast of actors that are perfectly competent and turns them into stilted fountains of exposition, which is something that isn’t their fault at all.
To conclude, Beneath Us All is a dull piece of pedestrian low-budget horror, with a lacklustre script, several obvious plots, vapid characterisation, and pacing which manages to make a 1 hr 30 mins feel like 5 hours. The only people I would recommend this movie to are skint absinthe enthusiasts, who can’t afford to pay the post-Brexit import mark-ups and are looking for a cheap way to find the same effect.
Bloody Flicks 