Spell (2020)
Directed by Mark Tonderai
A father survives a plane crash in rural Appalachia, but becomes suspicious of the elderly couple who take him in to nurse him back to health with the ancient remedies.
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His screenplay borrows heavily from about a dozen films from Misery to The Skeleton Key to Green Inferno , not to mention every flick where a group stops off at a creepy gas station only to realize they’ve gone too far off the map for their own safety.
Directed by Mark Tonderai ( House at the End of the Street ) from a script by Kurt Wimmer ( Equilibrium , Sphere ), Spell is clunky.
Writer-producer Wimmer, who over the last three decades has mixed variable originals (directorial projects “Ultraviolet” and “Equilibrium”), adaptations (“Street Kings,” “Sphere”) and remakes (“Point Break,” “Total Recall”), has the bones of an idiosyncratic supernatural tale here.
This tale of rural mayhem is an unexpected turn for scriptwriter Kurt Wimmer, who has previously mixed bizarro genre (Equilibrium, Ultraviolet) with studio action (Salt, The Thomas Crown Affair revamp).
Wimmer is a talented filmmaker in his own right having made the underappreciated sci-fi gem Equilibrium, but when it comes to the script he is clearly more in tune with fleshing out the spooky Hoodoo elements rather than the social dynamics.
Kurt Wimmer, whose best effort thus far has been the Orwellian sci-fi actioner Equilibrium, has crafted an extremely formulaic and generic script simply enamoured with ticking the boxes of every possible horror movie cliche imaginable.
Immediately upon touchdown he's confronted by unwelcoming hillbilly types, familiar from films such as "The Hills Have Eyes" or "Wrong Turn," who put cityfolk like Marquis and his family in their place.