[yasr_overall_rating]
A family are involved in an accident and take refuge in a secluded inn, where they free a girl locked in a basement without knowing she’s an ancient evil.
“The Damned”, aka “Gallows Hill”, is a supernatural horror film that takes place in South America. David (Peter Facinelli) and his fiancée Lauren (Sophia Myles) are only a few weeks away from their big day when they travel to Colombia to check up on David’s daughter Jill (Nathalia Ramos), whom he hasn’t heard from in some time. When they arrive, Jill’s boyfriend Ramon (Sebastian Martínez) is the cameraman for Jill’s friend Gina (Carolina Guerra) who is producing a documentary about the poor people in the city. Heading back to the hotel in torrential rain for their evening flight back to the U.S., they wind up taking a back road which gets flooded out and forces their vehicle off the road and into a ditch.
They manage to escape from the overturned car with some cuts and bruises and make their way down the road until they come across an old, seemingly abandoned inn. They quickly discover an old man living there who initially warns them to leave but when he sees that they are in bad shape, he lets them in, on the condition that they stay in the main room of the building where they proceed to light a fire. After a while, Jill has to find a bathroom and Ramon goes with her. While taking care of business, she can hear muffled cries coming from a vent in the bathroom and they quickly realize, that there’s someone else in the house. Naturally, they end up in the cellar where they come across a young girl who is locked up in a small room away from the world.
The old man tries to warn them not to let her out but he’s too late. One by one, they each succumb to demonic possession as the demon inside the girl transfers from body to body and they quickly find out that if you kill the physical being it is inhabiting, it will then take you over. The story on the whole is not the most original but director Víctor García makes up for that with relentless tension and a foreboding atmosphere that will have some peeking out from behind their seat. The movie attains its horrors the old fashioned way, relying instead on genuine scares and practical effects unlike most other horror films today which employ an overabundance of inferior CGI.
The performances are absorbing and because most of the cast is made up of relative unknowns, the film benefits because of it. Peter Facinelli, who rose to stardom appearing in the “Twilight” movies, is genuinely convincing and carries the movie because we believe in him, his situation and his surroundings. He is an actor that can disappear into the story and its environs, like a chameleon and in a horror movie, that is paramount because we are dealing with forces that for the most part, in real life anyway, choose to stay hidden. Director Víctor García extracts almost as much fear from the anticipation as from the payoff and in today’s market of CGI-filled, soulless, hollow movies, that is a rare achievement.
Opening on VOD July 25th and theatrically August 29th
