Making a deal with the Devil is usually a sure fire way to have some fun on film. I mean, honestly, there’s a lot of different avenues to explore while you’re using any trickster god as an antagonist and who better than the Prince of Darkness to really make about trying to save your own soul pop? Add that indie movie passion and some halfway decent looking practical effects and you know I’m going to sit down and give it a look. Trailers for The Campus looked good. The scenes were dark, well shot, and the creature filling in for Satan looked pretty damned cool. But you can’t judge a film by its trailer so how.
The Campus is about a young woman named Morgan who returns home for her father’s funeral. There was no love lost between her and her alcoholic, purposefully cruel father or her younger sister who was doted on by the same drunken deadbeat dad. That night, using keys she swiped from the dead man’s home, she breaks in to his office to steal some things and inadvertently finds herself fighting for her life as she is murdered and resurrected again and again as a part of a pact that dear old dad had made with the devil.
You know, on the surface, it sounds pretty good. I mean, honestly, with a story like that how can you fail?
Allow me to enlighten you.
The concept is different, I’ll give them that. The execution of the story, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Quite simply there isn’t any clear development or connection between beginning and end. The story starts in 1991 in the Kalahari Desert -a separate issue I’ll get to in a minute- then moves to 2018 Burbank. An archaeologist(?) unearths an ancient temple and steals an arrow somehow connected to the devil. Almost 30 years later he drops dead and his oldest daughter, the one he’s treated like crap since birth, inherits the consequences of her father’s bargaining with the demon who allowed him to live. It’s only in flashbacks and fractured bits of exposition through the film that we actually get any kind of backstory to understand what is going on and, even then, there are still so many questions asked. Character and plot development are practically non-existent and there are a lot of scenes that just don’t make any damn sense whatsoever because of it.
The entire film takes place on the ANC campus, a studio/event venue involved in the production of the film. The location itself is a quizzical thing as it seems to have so much and so little to do with the actual film. Part of the locale is used as the home of the protagonist’s dead father while others appear to be his office and some kind of closed or abandoned education center but, again, nothing is ever elaborated on and it’s up to the viewer to interpret the data flickering across the screen rather than actually showing any kind of clear connections or definitive information.
Next, and this is a little trifling and petty on my part, but if you’re going to spend the money, time, and effort to make a feature film, let’s at least get the few details you’re sharing with the audience correct. The film opens with an establishing shot of a sparse desert and three men walking across it. The caption to the bottom left of the screen reads “Kalahari Desert, South America, 1991.” Okay, now, I know that the Kalahari is in the area of South Africa so I assume that maybe I just misread that. That is until five minutes in where one of the three woefully ill equipped and completely inexplicable characters in the desert says something about Aztec markings and mythology while looking at a carving on a cave wall. You know, as I said, it’s trifling and for people who have no concept of geography it’s irrelevant.
Moving on.
The effects work on The Campus is a mixed bag. The practical and makeup effects, while nothing sensational or new, were entertaining and, at times, extremely well done. The visual effects, however, looked more like something shot in the 60’s or that a couple of middle schoolers with a camcorder did over the weekend. A cattle skull headed robed figure and some other bizarre hallucinations reminiscent of a bad acid trip plague Morgan but are just simply too awful in design and execution to be anything more than laughable.
You’re probably wondering what, if anything I enjoyed about this movie? The soundtrack is epic. A mixture of classically styled compositions reminiscent of the old black and white era of horror films coupled with synthesizer riffs straight out of an 80’s slasher or John Carpenter flick, the music itself provided a lot of suspense and atmosphere. Also, I really enjoyed the way it was shot. With several scenes utilizing close ups and so much negative space, you were often left wondering where the next horror was going to lurch out from. There were a lot of great shots of Morgan trying to orient herself with the slightly blurred background of an open door or stairwell off to one side or another suggesting that something was waiting just off camera. The lighting only added to this ominous feeling.
The Campus isn’t great and I hate even writing that into a review. I don’t like trashing a film because there is a lot of hard work and effort that goes into producing any movie of any length be it a five minute short or a two hour epic. But I’m a stickler for story and character development and there just wasn’t any there. That said, I loved the cinematography in so much of this that I can tell you I’ll definitely watch it again just to enjoy and maybe even learn a little bit from some of the angles and setups used. As a fan of low budget horror, don’t get your hopes up for anything more than a couple of cheap jump scares. As an amateur filmmaker, watch it for the artistic value of the shots and the use of a powerful score to keep an audience engaged.
The Campus is streaming on Amazon.