Director: Adam Robitel
Writers: Adam Robitel, Gavin Heffernan
Stars: Jill Larson, Anne Ramsay, Michelle Ang
1 Hour, 30 Minutes
Grab it from Amazon: https://amzn.to/34iZNy8
Synopsis
We start out with Mia’s documentary crew going to meet Alzheimer’s patient Deborah Logan and her daughter Sarah. Deborah doesn’t want to do the film, but if she wants to keep her house, they need the money the film crew has offered.
One week later, the filming starts. We get a documentary-style explanation of what Alzheimer’s Disease is and does. We get doctor interviews and voiceover of Deborah’s medical history. There’s a lot of Deborah and Sarah talking over each other.
The crew installs some video cameras throughout the house. She chases the cameraman around the house with a knife because she thinks he stole her spade and then falls on the floor in a temper tantrum. She then grabs a piece of glass and tries to slit her throat. The doctors increase her medication and send her home.
We see in one scene that she paints dark shape of a man in the woods. Soon, she starts talking to someone that isn’t there. She’s convinced that there’s some guy out in the yard, and she then nails the windows shut. That night, Deborah gets out of bed and runs through the woods, stabbing the ground with her spade.
She starts getting more violent and self-destructive, and the doctor tells us that this is not typical for Alzheimer’s patients. There may be some other problem involved as well, possibly schizophrenia.
About this point, I thought that we’d gotten past the point of home care. There’s a very good reason for nursing homes, and this is it. They start to notice some things on the camera that shouldn’t be there. The window opens by itself, Deborah gets up on the stove in a blink of an eye, and there are a whole series of those paintings with the shadow man coming closer and closer to the house.
One night they find her naked in the attic working an old switchboard. They hear a demonic-sounding voice and the switchboard explodes. The cameraman translates what she said into “The eternal serpent will set you free. Your blood will feed the river. ” Yeah, that ain’t right. They notice that she kept trying to call 337 on the switchboard, and they think that might be important.
They look up who had phone extension 337, and it belonged to a pediatrician who killed four children thirty years ago. They were all cut with the symbol of the snake. The doctor disappeared after killing the four girls, but the ritual called for five girls. They don’t know why he didn’t kill all five. Deborah remembers the name and says “He’s not missing. He’s dead.” She then pukes up dirt and worms.
The neighbor Harris wants to get rid of the camera crew and becomes generally annoying. He denies that Deborah knew Desjardins. Harris comes right over and shoots the videographer’s van up.
Soon after Deborah tries to make off with a child from the hospital, she goes full demon-possessed. Sarah goes to see a priest for an exorcism.
They go see a professor of anthropology who explains that weak minds are vulnerable to other things coming in. He explains that he’s seen a case like this with the mother of a dead boy and they cured her by burning the boy’s body.
Deborah is strapped to the bed continually until Harris releases her. He tries to smother her with a pillow, but then a TV flies across the room and hits him. Harris is dying in the hospital, and he explains that Sarah was going to be Desjardin’s fifth victim, but Deborah buried him alive in the backyard.
They go to dig up the body and find Deborah’s spade. They think Deborah already dug it up and hid it somewhere, knowing that the body is Desjardin’s weak point. The find the body in a burlap sack full of snakes. They have to burn the body. The fire flashes up and there’s more screaming. The body won’t burn.
Deborah rips her arms up escaping from the bonds and then grabs the little girl again and leaves the hospital. She bites the guard in the neck and poisons him. They think she’s headed to the mill to complete the ritual for Desjardins. They catch up to her and the girl in the woods. She spits acid venom on the cops and leaves again in the confusion.
Sarah creeps up behind Deborah with a syringe full of sedative, but when she spins around, it’s not her anymore. They chase her once again and find Deborah swallowing the girl like a giant snake would. They try burning the body in the mine, and it works as expected.
The last scene is of Caroline, the little girl, a year later, fully healed from her cancer. She gives the camera a creepy look.
Commentary
Alzheimer’s is a pretty sad and terrifying thing all by itself, but even in the early parts where we meet Deborah and Sarah, there’s not much emotion shown here. Maybe it was because I knew something else was coming, but I had no attachment at all to these characters.
There are a ridiculous number of scenes where they are walking around with flashlights, but there’s no reason they couldn’t have just turned on the lights. This includes one trip to the morgue in a hospital; the power was working just fine there, and there was zero reason to be using flashlights. There’s a lot of places where people scream over each other.
There’s some excellent surgical gore, such as a close-up of a spinal tap and a rash that develops on Deborah’s back. If you don’t like snakes (and who does?) there’s some creepy stuff here.
Funny how the cameras always work perfectly until there’s something scary to see and then they get all flashy and jittery, obscuring what we want to see. It happens every time Deborah looks at the camera, so we never really get a good look at Deborah.