Filmed on a shoestring budget of $200,000 over the course of two years, “Malevolence” went on to gross millions of dollars and spawned two sequels. All three films were shot around Bethlehem, Pennsylvania which is the perfect setting for rural terror and screams that can’t be heard for a country mile.
A six-year-old boy named Martin Bristol is taken from a park and chained in a basement. He’s forced to watch a hooded man stab a helpless woman to death. Cut to ten years later, Julian and Marilyn are in a cheap motel room discussing their debt to some criminals and their upcoming bank job. They’re inexperienced but with the help of Samantha’s brother Max and his shady partner Kurt, they head to the job. The bank job doesn’t go well and the idiotic gang heads to a dilapidated country house to wait for things to cool down. Spoiler alert, it’s the wrong house.
In “Malevolence 2: Bereavement,” a prequel no one asked for, it gets a story that’s clunky and overwritten. With an increased budget this time around, writer/director Stevan Mena casts Alexandra Daddario and Michael Biehn, they are well-known actors but even they become victims of the poor screenplay and flat dialogue. There’s a lot of potential with some great cinematography and genuine suspense but it’s inconsistently sustained and overall too cruel. I sometimes wonder where the line between dramatizing extreme violence and just filming perverted toxic fantasies is drawn. Mena seems like he really hates women since they make up 90% of the victims. Creepy masked killers skewering petrified humans in a farmhouse had already been covered over 40 years ago with the superior “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
Things get even worse in “Malevolence 3: Killer” and I’m not going to even get into the endless rubbish on display. I like low-budget horrors with sparsity, resulting in a scary yet believable feel. Director Stevan Mena seems to be inspired by Wes Craven’s style from the ’70s with subtle dread-filled camera work. There’s also quite a bit of beauty with purple and orange emblazoned sunsets over the landscape. The rest of the sequels spiral into monotonous slasher jump-scares. Perhaps that’s why the slasher genre is pretty much dead, it’s hard to keep it interesting.
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