Lace Crater

The movie starts out somewhat slow. The concept behind this movie was rather interesting, but I could not get past Ruth's pompous friends. Why exactly does she associate with these people who are rotten towards her? Took away from the movie quite a bit. Most of the characters you could feel nothing for as a result.

...when Ruth (played by Lindsay Burdge, The Midnight Swim, The Invitation), and her twenty something aged friends spend a weekend in the Hamptons. The guest house becomes more of a ghost house, when an insecure specter makes his presence known. Awkward, yet charming conversation leads to a passionate one-night stand. A suspected hangover spirals into supernatural STD body horror. Burdge's performance is enthralling from start to finish. Each scene patiently plays out, amplified by beautifully framed closeups and rolling focus. Writer/Director Harrison Atkins has given us a unique, intimate, and subtly humorous take on mumble horror.

So a woman sleeps with a ghost. Then she becomes ill. And that's it. Slow paced with moments of what could be spooky or creepy, but the film doesn't put much effort into take it in that direction. So, just a weird indie film of a woman with a ghostly disease. Huh.

When the overarching premise of the indie horror drama "Lace Crater" is introduced you will likely wonder if this is some kind of a goofy send up or an absurdist farce. I sure as hell did. But as events unfold it soon becomes apparent that this is far from what we gradually get in this fresh and wonderfully weird take on one of the most classic of all movie milieu's, the ghost story.

Let it be said that Lindsay Burdge ("The Invitation") is outstanding as Ruth, a young woman who makes it with an apparent apparition and suffers a frightening fallout as dire consequences ensue in the wake of this supernatural and super STRANGE tryst. Burdge absolutely HAD to sell her unusually demanding role here, and she does so with fabulously flying colors, many of them through bursts of stunningly psychedelic sensationalism.

Considerable kudos go to first-time feature film Director Harrison Atkins (who also wrote and edited this creepily compelling story) as well as Cinematographer Gideon de Villiers and primary Digital Visual Effects wizard Alejandro Ovalle. These three guys in particular team up to make "Lace Crater" a total trip for the senses, keeping you both entertained and consistently knocked off balance as scene after spooky scene burn themselves into your barraged brain.

For the life of me I could not determine why in the hell this flick is called "Lace Crater", having heretofore, and not surprisingly, never heard the two terms used together in tandem. However, recently I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Harrison Atkins by phone and he hipped me up. Seems that "lace" signifies the genteel nature of women, while "crater" connotes what Atkins evidently believes is the "cratering", or demolition, of such feminine refinement. Straight up, folks, I'm not going to proclaim to entirely grasp how this notion applies in the context of what we are presented with in "Lace Crater". But then again, as I've also never really SEEN a film like what Atkins gives us here, either, I'm more than willing to go with it.

This is without question one of THE most patently bizarro endings this reviewer has ever seen. Just about the best way I can even TRY to describe what happens is by way of this weighty quote by the great German writer Thomas Mann...

"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."

Or something relatively approximating that at any rate.

I concluded our conversation by asking Atkins what he has percolating in terms of his next production. And while his answer was decidedly yet purposefully vague, the indication is that fans can expect more of the same surreal style of offbeat and unorthodox entertainment as we are treated to in "Lace Crater".

Can not wait.