Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Aaron B. Koontz
Starring: Devin Druid, Zachary Knighton, Bill Sage, Pat Healy, Natasha Bassett,
Stan Shaw, Melora Walters
If you asked me to name my two favourite movie genres I'd have to say
horror and the western. In terms of quality, they're poles apart. As they
tend to attract opportunistic hacks, the vast majority of horror movies are
unwatchable, but the best horror movies rank with the very best of cinema as
a whole. The western on the other hand is a genre with relatively few duds,
likely because it requires a lot of work to pull off the period setting and
so dissuades cynical filmmakers from dabbling in the form. With rare
exceptions like 1959's Curse of the Undead and 2015's
Bone Tomahawk, attempts to mash both genres have produced messy results. They're two
great flavours that just don't seem to go together, and director
Aaron B. Koontz's The Pale Door is but the latest
genre-bending misfire.
Following a prologue in which we're introduced to young brothers Jake and
Duncan as their parents are killed in a raid on their homestead, we cut to
several years down the line. Oddly, despite there having been merely a few
years between the pair as kids, Jake (Devin Druid) is now a
wet-behind-the-ears teenager while Duncan (Zachary Knighton) appears
to be pushing 40.
Anyhow, Duncan is now the leader of the feared Dalton gang, and reluctantly
recruits his kid brother to take part in an upcoming train heist. As is so
often the case, the robbery doesn't go to plan. Duncan is wounded by a
bullet and the locked chest they expected to be filled with gold is instead
revealed as housing a chained young woman, Pearl (Natasha Bassett),
who claims the outlaws will be richly rewarded if they return her to her
home.
Pearl's home turns out to be a high class brothel, much to the delight of
the horny outlaws. But these are no ordinary ladies of the night - they're
the reincarnated witches who were burned in the Salem trials, and the Dalton
gang find themselves battling to survive the night.
Okay, here's my major issue with The Pale Door. The Salem witch trials led to the deaths of several woman and men who
were (obviously) falsely believed to be carrying out the work of Satan. Yet
we still get horror movies that take the side of their Christian
fundamentalist persecutors in continuing the lie that they were actual
witches. As soon as it's revealed that the hookers of
The Pale Door are the victims of Salem we automatically assume
that the movie is going to make them anti-heroes of a fashion, but no, the
film asks us to root for the outlaws, who are a deeply unlikable bunch. You
wouldn't cast Jews as the villains of a WWII movie, so why would you paint
the women of Salem as horror antagonists?
Even if you can get on board with such insensitive victim-blaming, there's
little here to satisfy fans of either the horror or western genres. On the
western side, it looks the part, but Alex Cuervo's anachronistically
modern score completely kills the Old West mood. As a horror movie, it's
devoid of scares or suspense, and when the witches transform into their
stake-burnt selves, the effect just looks silly. But chiefly, it all comes
back to the film's tone deaf decision to ask us to root for a group of
irredeemable men as they gun down the female victims of one of the darkest
chapters of American history.
