‘Curse Of Crom’ Is Perfectly Fine Gateway Horror [FilmQuest 2022 Review]
Curse of Crom: The Legend of Halloween (also known as Curse of Crom) feels like a kiddie movie made by horror fans. You find yourself rooting for it despite yourself. There’s something about the creature, and the lore, that shows some care was given. It’s giving Are You Afraid of The Dark? and Goosebumps, mixed in with some Poltergeist and The Goonies. However, there is something just left of the center stopping it from hitting its mark.
In the film, high school teenagers accidentally unleash an ancient Irish entity on their hometown and must stop it before midnight on Halloween. Our protagonist Mary (Chelsea Jurkiewicz), is delivering food to make money for college. She does this because of her strained relationship with her parents, specifically her dad. Mary’s story gets very predictable early in the movie. It’s made for kids, so that’s fine, but gives us no mystery or reason to invest. She has a pool of friends along for the ride to try to insert humor. The humor is also aimed at kids but comes across as cloying to anyone older than 10. One of the things I think hurts this movie is that it is playing down to children. However, today’s kids are smarter than most of these jokes.
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Curse of Crom is a Kickstarter-funded project. So we also have to remember that might be where some of the issues arise out of funding. It felt like there were missing scenes, or moments, to lead into some of the more dramatic turns. For instance, Mary’s dad walks into her room at one point while she’s going through the folder she found that reveals she’s adopted. She’s had this info for a while but hasn’t said anything to her parents. Now all of a sudden she’s crying and ready to fight about it. However, in the scene before she was talking to her love interest, Harvey (Tanner Gillman), and was fine.
Mary also doesn’t connect the dots from her adoption to the history of the monster until the awkward final battle. What is supposed to be a lightbulb moment comes at a really weird time for dialogue. This scene highlights the fact that we have too many people in this scene that aren’t in imminent danger.
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Another thing hurting Curse of Crom is the simple misfortune of coming out in a year that gave us stronger PG-13 horror entries. Umma, The Curse of Bridge Hollow, and even Spirit Halloween: The Movie came to family night with something for everyone. To varying degrees of success, they all showed up to the kiddie horror pool but managed to stand out. Whereas, the main draw for Curse of Crom is that it feels like it was made by people who studied the kid horror fodder from the 80s and 90s. Those eras were moments, and a throwback to that time is a cool idea. However, the execution didn’t stick the landing.
Let me know if you are checking out Curse of Crom at @misssharai.
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Curse Of Crom
Summary
It’s a movie for the kids but has the spirit of a movie you want to root for. It’s a fine gateway entry for tykes wanting to get into the genre but not as metal as we were at that age.
