Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
The Lucio Fulci inspired “When Evil Lurks,” which world premiered in the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness section on Friday night, is best remembered for its anarchic brutality. This movie doesn’t play fair dogs and kids are not safe or innocent, for the record and it gains strength from occasionally tipping over into gory, gnarly insanity. It’s a nasty piece of work when it wants to be; arguably it could have been nastier more often. Once you’ve opened the gates to hell, viewers are willing to follow wherever you want to take them.
Brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimmy (Demian Salomon) discover that a “rotten” has been growing in a nearby farmhouse when livestock start acting funny. That’s always the first sign that things are about to go very wrong in a movie like “When Evil Lurks.” Watch the animals they know before we do.
A “rotten” is a word for a possessed being, and it’s an appropriately evocative term. In this case, the poor possessed soul looks like a bloated, oozing mess. But people should not show this hideous abomination the end of their shotguns; that’s what the demon wants because then it lets out even more evil Well, yes, things do go very wrong after some truly stupid decisions on our heroes’ part, and Pedro and Jimmy have to try and put the demon genie back in the bottle as it wreaks grisly havoc across their community.
And I do mean grisly. The first really “whoa” scene involves an axe and a pregnant woman. And then it gets gnarlier than that. In an era of cynical meta horror, it feels like something whose key aim is not so much “conversation starter” as “stomach turner.” Rugna builds tension through these acts of abject horror that are just extreme an evil that can make humans and creatures act violently in the most unexpected ways, possessed by pure malevolence. The possession aspect of “When Evil Lurks” adds another level of tension because no one can be trusted. It almost makes you wonder if Rugna’s film could be read as a COVID-19 parable in that once pure evil is out there, anyone can get it, and nobody can be trusted.
Unfortunately, the second half of “When Evil Lurks” is not as strong as its first, when Rugna tends to overexplain what Pedro and Jimmy have to do and the general lore around a “rotten;” they even team up with a “cleaner” (Silvina Sabater) who feels almost like an expositional narrator designed to keep us informed of what must happen next. Nor does it help that the final act ends up hinging on a largely silent autistic young man’s ability to withstand possession because demons can’t easily “figure out their minds,” which makes Pedro’s son (Emilio Vodanovich) feel like kind of a manipulative character choice.
To show more chaos than establishes a story or gets too sentimental about main characters and their families, the “When Evil Lurks” concept could have been presented differently. This exposition is too direct and so is this narrative glueing by Fulci. People only need to be shocked or scared at anything even if they don’t know what that thing is.
“When Evil Lurks” falls short of its potential but has indelible images. If there’s not too much sickness involved, some viewers won’t mind the undercooked and overdone parts of the bloody stew it serves up.
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