More ups than downs

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This article was published 14/09/2023 (750 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A group of people are marked for death at the hands of an evil entity when they blithely invoke a demonic entity via a seemingly harmless ritual.

Let’s face it, that premise is getting as ancient as Cthulhu. But the movies keep coming.

Elevator Game, shot in Winnipeg a year ago, veers away from Evil Dead and skews closer to Candyman (without the racial subtext) in this horror offering from Rebekah McKendry, who gave us the more inventive Lovecraftian horror Glorious just last year.

That film, shot during COVID-19 restrictions, was mostly centred on a man who meets a fugitive demi-god in a highway rest stop.

McKendry joked that after shooting much of both Elevator Game and Glorious in enclosed spaces, she was ready to expand her horizons. “I’ve made a bathroom movie and I’ve made an elevator movie — and now I want to shoot in a field,” she told the Free Press last year.

“It’s going to be a western, because I don’t want the feeling of four walls around it.”

In fact, Elevator Game makes the most of Exchange District atmosphere in a story that sees would-be influencer Ryan (Gino Anania) join a group of young would-be media stars trying to make a go of a web series that sees them debunk urban horror stories.

Ryan has hidden intentions. He is trying to discover the truth behind the disappearance of his sister Becki (Megan Best). She’d taken on the task of playing the titular game — a ritual originating in South Korea and Japan that is said to transport people to another world via elevator — to impress the group’s capricious star Kris (Alec Carlos), with apparently disastrous results.

Playing the game again with Ryan along for the ride unleashes a retributive killfest by the spectral “The 5th Floor Woman.”

There have been some great scary scenes that take place in an elevator. (See the 2002 Hong Kong film The Eye or Brian de Palma’s 1980 classic Dressed to Kill, just for starters.)

McKendry doesn’t ever go for the jugular, terror-wise. But she does muster a few unsettling scenes, especially when Ryan and a sympathetic cohort (Verity Marks, who also starred in 2020’s Toys of Terror), enter a mythic red realm, the evil alternate universe where the fifth-floor woman roams.

The film also makes admirable use of local talent. Virtually the entire cast is locally sourced, including Madison MacIsaac, Nazariy Demkowicz and Liam Stewart-Kanigan. Marks and Megan Best — a Winnipeg horror vet with Seance (2021) and Bring It On: Cheer or Die (2022) on her cv — stand out.

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Also in the ever-growing subgenre of locally shot softcore horror aimed at young adults is All Fun and Games, newly released in on-demand services. This supernatural thriller stars Natalia Dyer and Asa Butterfield as a couple of wastrel siblings obliged to step up when their little brother (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) becomes possessed by a cursed knife he found in a rotting old house. (The story is set in Salem: locations around Springfield and Selkirk make for a decent substitute.)

Directed by Eren Celeboglu and Ari Costa, this is a fast 76-minute fat-free thriller where the principal shock is seeing former child star Asa Butterworth playing a dissolute lout-turned-demon.

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