Director: Joel Schumacher
Writer: David Kajganich
Stars: Henry Cavill, Dominic Purcell, Emma Booth
Run Time: 1 Hour, 30 Minutes
Link:
Synopsis
We hear via voiceover that in the 1930s, Hitler became obsessed with the occult. He sent people out searching for “stones” that would describe the path toward immortality.
As credits roll, we see a family of farmers, the Wollners, butchering hogs in 1936, when the world was still in black and white. The farmer gets a letter from Berlin. It’s a request for them to house a German scientist who is researching some vague topic. They will be paid handsomely for letting the man stay with them; they have little choice but to accept.
Mr. Wirth arrives, and he looks like Michael Fassbender. Their viking ancestors left their rune stones behind when the Indians drove them out, but the rune stone is still a part of the foundation of the barn. He goes out to look at the stone. The girl’s pet bird has died, but Wirth brings it back to life using an incantation and his personal power, but only for a moment. He expects that while using the stone, he’ll be able to do much better.
We flash forward to modern times, but now it’s filmed in color. There’s a police standoff with a screaming woman in a meth lab. We see that Evan is a paramedic on the scene. He drives home to his isolated cabin. He argues with his invalid father, who is confused about Evan’s missing brother due to his dementia. Evan visits the grave of Victor, who has been gone long enough to have been declared dead.
That night, he dreams of his brother. When he wakes up, Victor is standing there, demanding his help. He looks like someone who has been living in the woods for two years. The two of them go off into the woods by truck, then canoe, then on foot. They have literally hours in which to talk, explain, and plan, but they don’t do any of that. The two brothers come to a large encampment and climb over the fence. It’s the Wollner farm, where Wirth and the rune stone were so many years ago.
They break into the house, and end up shooting one of the men inside. A girl swings a knife at Evan and then runs away. They catch her and tie her and her grandmother up. There’s something in the black container outside that Victor hates, and no one else will talk about. Evan sees a photo of the people in the house, dated 1940, and they haven’t changed a bit. “Time doesn’t touch us,” says Liese. “I’ve been seventeen for longer than you’ve been alive.”
Evan goes to check out the container, and Victor tells him not to look inside. Inside the container is another man, Luke, chained to the walls and clearly tortured. He says he’s been there about a week. They can’t get the bindings released, so they continue their search and plan to return for him. They cannot get the door to the cellar under te barn open. Evan finds skeletons in the barn. They finally manage to cut Luke loose and start to head out, but a truck arrives at the farm.
Victor shoots the truck driver, who crashes into the barn. This destroys the sealed doors that Victor couldn’t open before. Something nasty comes out of the barn cellar. It’s Mr. Wirth, now mutated into something demonic.
Everyone runs into the house, and then they barricade the doors. Wirth kills the horses and then brings them back under his control. The horses then break into the house and start killing people. Wirth finds the dead man outside and resuscitates him as well. Wirth was sent by the Nazis to practice the occult, and the Wollners trapped him in the barn with mystic runes painted on the windows. If the brothers can make it outside the line of the fences, they’ll be all right, but the Wollners can never leave.
Every time the brothers kill someone, Wirth brings them back. Over and over. One of the dead attacks Evan, who picks up the magic bone knife that Liese dropped earlier. That works on them. “We had him contained until you came here!” Liese explains. The stone gives him more strength, she adds. His final transformation will happen under an eclipse, which happens to be tonight…
Wirth does his ritual and drives a spike through his forehead to release his third eye. Meanwhile, Victor battles a possessed dog. They need the bone shirt to use against him; they’re like Kryptonite. They could also poison him with the blood of his own family, as kept in the bones. The brothers cut open Evan, and they contaminate his blood with crushed powdered bones from the barn.
Sure enough, Wirth comes in and starts licking Evan like a blood popsicle. He and Evan fight, and Victor saws Wirth’s head off with a piece of barbed wire and Evan stabs him in the third eye. All the dead horses and servants collapse, dead for real this time.
Liese tells us that there were eight other stones like theirs around the country, and Hitler sent someone to examine each of them. She’s instantly aged a bunch and is now in her 90s. She doesn’t last very long and dies conveniently after she’s given her ominous warning. The brothers burn everything else to the ground. They both go home and try to explain where Victor’s been for two years. Evan has written down the names of the farmers who had the other rune stones– will he go after them?
Commentary
They’d traveled for hours to get to the farmhouse, why didn’t Victor try to explain anything to Evan first? Things would have gone far more smoothly and quickly had Evan known what was going on. If your brother hands you a shotgun and says we’re going into this house to hold those people hostage, you think you’d want to know about that before you’re at the front door.
It’s got the star power, at least just before they were big. Dominic Purcell gets top billing over Henry Cavill and Michael Fassbender; that probably won’t be happening again.
I gotta admit, I have never seen demon-possessed killer horses before. This was pretty bloody, and there’s a lot of gore and general mayhem. Overall, the story itself is fairly predictable, but I didn’t get bored at any point. Fassbender has a good scene at the beginning of the film, but once we get to modern times, he’s buried under so much makeup that it could literally be someone else in that mask.
Overall, I liked it, but it doesn’t pay to think about it much. Or at all.