Cherry Tree (2015)

Welcome to the charming town of Orchard that got its name from - and I quote - an “evil cherry tree” and the shenanigans witches trying to betray Satan got up to some centuries ago. In the Now, Teenager Faith (Naomi Battrick) lives in Orchard with her father Sean (Sam Hazeldine). Alas, Sean is dying of leukaemia, the experimental drug his doctor gave him not having the hoped for effect.

Faith’s new hockey teacher Sissy (Anna Walton) – the old one got murdered by a satanic witches coven wearing stylish sacks on their heads in the prologue – offers the girl a pact: she’ll save Sean’s life with black centipedes and evil cherry tree based magic if Faith agrees to be impregnated and carry Satan’s love child for the witches. Obviously, there’s no way this could possibly go wrong for anyone involved.

Now, if you’re like me (or even better for you, if you are indeed me), you’ll probably have expected a witch-based horror movies by the director and the scriptwriter of Wake Wood to be some sort of folk horror film, probably with quite a bit of emotional depth. Then you’ll read about the evil cherry tree, get the first (and only, boo) lesbian kiss in the very first scene of the film, encounter the first moment of gratuitous female nudity about five minutes later, and just might change your expectations in the right direction. For this is indeed a deeply silly, trashy, and somewhat lurid horror film that reminds me a lot of many a regionally produced US occult horror film from the 70s, with a bit of Eurohorror of the same era thrown in, just much slicker looking than the former (Keating’s visual style has improved considerably since Wake Wood), and not as authentically dream-like as the latter.

If that’s the sort of thing that sounds as if it might float your boat, Cherry Tree will most probably indeed do so, for while little of the film makes sense, or shows much depth or insight into humanity at large or in detail, it does dance the seductive dance of lurid trash very, very well. After the comparatively sane and serious first twenty minutes or so, there’s hardly a scene going by where the film doesn’t adorably work up to something awesome, be it one of the more absurd demon sex scenes I’ve seen, or its attempts to try and find more use for centipedes than Centipede Horror had, or the grand finale including random demonic violence, ripped off skin, and the not-inspired-by-Hellraiser at all look Anna Walton spouts there. It makes little sense – be it as a narrative, a dream, or just a film with a coherent idea of what its supernatural is actually about – but it looks and plays really well as what it is. Whatever the hell that may be.

Speaking of Walton, I’d be remiss if I didn’t praise her overacting here, as well as her pretty successful attempt at not throwing a single look (and she really throwing every single one of them with greatest gusto) that doesn’t paint “I am an evil evil witch!” in the sky in letters made of blood and centipedes. Naomi Battrick for her part plays Faith as if she were in some sort of at least semi-realist kitchen sink drama, making a dignified teenage (well, sort-of) mien to the insanity going on around her. And the film really does get pretty insane, not just with one of the more hilariously absurd stinger endings I’ve seen in quite some time (so bizarre I couldn’t even get annoyed by it) but also with all of the random stuff it throws out again and again. Why does Faith wake up in a big cocoon she shares with her dad, and what’s with the webbing surrounding it? Is that something Irish centipedes do? Why does Satan need a teenage girl to fight his battles? And so on, and so forth, until one’s mind is all filled up with the incredible nonsense Cherry Tree produces, and the special kind of joyous glow that comes with pregnancyhorror films this unashamed about being schlock.

Wake Wood (2011)

After their little daughter Alice (Ella Connolly) was bitten to death by a dog, veterinarian Patrick (Aidan Gillen) and his wife, pharmacist Louise (Eva Birthistle), have moved to the small country town of Wake Wood to get over the loss a bit more easily.

Now, about a year after Alice's death, the couple has reached the stage in their grieving process experts call "clinical depression". Especially Louise still can't cope the loss at all, a problem that's not made smaller by the fact that she knows she won't be able to have any further children. But it turns out that Wake Wood is just the right (or maybe just the wrong, given the movie's genre) place the couple could have come to.

The town's inhabitants semi-secretly still follow certain pagan traditions they are willing to share with Louise and Patrick. With the right ritual, there's the possibility to bring back to life anyone who hasn't been dead for more than a year, at least for three days, which surely is better than nothing. The couple is desperate enough to go through the rather frightening ritual, and their daughter is reborn.

However, not everything is well; something's just not right with Alice apart from the fact that dead little girls shouldn't walk around.

As far as I know, some amount of money of the revived Hammer Films went into the production of Wake Wood, though I'm not sure in how far this is "A Hammer Production" in the sense that the re-animated studio had actual influence on the film, and not just a film Hammer bought to put their logo on the DVD after the fact.

It doesn't matter too much anyhow, because, unlike that unnecessary Let The Right One In remake and the horrible Beyond the Rave, Wake Wood is a film that has a lot more going for it than the once good name of Hammer. For one, the film has a more than decent script, that - apart from an ending that asks for more suspension of disbelief than I'm able to achieve and the fact that there wouldn't have been much of a plot if the local pagans had bothered to explain what can go wrong with their rituals under which circumstances a little better - is well constructed, features believable grown-up characters, and does the classical clever horror film trick of using the supernatural to explore some rather horrible emotional depths.

Director David Keating manages to tell a story that could have easily turned into bad melodrama in a dignified way that doesn't shy away from looking at the less picturesque truths about loss. Wake Wood doesn't look down when it comes to its characters' suffering, but it's not a film whose cruelty is gratuitous or without compassion.

I'm also quite enamoured with the pagan ritual at the core of the film's plot. The whole set-up, especially how the archaic and the modern come together in the way the townsfolk practice their religion, carries an air of authenticity. Here, I think, do the comparisons between Wake Wood and The Wicker Man I've seen made come in, but except for the believable religious set-up, both films have nothing much in common; there are completely different aesthetic and thematic interests at work in both films. Be that as it may, it's not difficult to believe that, if there were pagan necromantic rituals that actually do work, they'd look a lot like the one in Wake Wood.

I'm not as enamoured by the film's visual presentation. The cinematography is at times a bit bland, and Keating as a director does not seem to be too interested in the "visual" part of visual storytelling, and wastes some opportunities of enhancing the film's mood further through the landscape it takes place in. Obviously, the film's visibly low budget couldn't have helped there.

Nonetheless, I can heartily recommend Wake Wood. There isn't that much horror made with a grown-up audience in mind around right now, and the films strengths are winning out over its weaknesses quite nicely.

 

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