Recently screened as part of the Cambridge Film Festival in England, END OF THE LINE is writer-director Maurice Devereaux’s first film since 2001’s $LASHER$, a technically ambitious satire of both reality TV and slasher flicks. This movie has some questionable scripting choices (a prominent character announces “I gotta take a major dump” during an otherwise intense sequence) and shaky supporting performances, but it otherwise represents the filmmaker’s most accomplished work to date. Overcoming the tiny budget with ingenuity and making effectively claustrophobic use of the pokey subway setting, Devereaux has made an offbeat contribution to 21st century apocalyptic horror cinema.
The premise exploits many of our contemporary fears : fears of strange men on the subway, fear of terrorist attacks (from the very start, radio reports of suicide bombings dominate the soundtrack) and fear of extreme religious fanaticism. Psychiatric nurse Ilona Elkin, recovering from the suicide of a former patient, unwittingly boards an underground train on which several passengers are members of the “Church of Eternal Hope”, a rising cult overseen by an insane, manipulative Reverend. The cult members, fearing the imminent end of the world, clutch pagers that alert them of an urgent need to carry out “God’s work”. This means “saving” the souls of their fellow man by killing them with daggers and swords.
Memorable for its jarring scenes of blandly smiling, blandly dressed, murderously deluded cultists savagely attacking passengers with ironically crafted weaponry, END OF THE LINE delivers graphic splatter and novel ideas in equal measure. Punctuated by chilling glimpses of the outside world descending into violent chaos, filtered (a la NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) via a beleaguered media, the movie sustains an edgy ambience while broadly satirizing religious hypocrisy. The violence, with convincing make up effects by Adrien Morot, is satisfyingly harsh and Devereaux has no qualms about brutally killing usually safe character types such as pregnant women, pensioners and pubescent children.
At its best, this movie has an impressively bleak vibe recalling – if not matching – the best of post-Romero American horror. Some of the minor characters are one-note and the ambiguity of the story is hampered by the late emergence of hokey red-eyed demons, but END OF THE LINE still shapes up as a grisly, scary indie chiller.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
