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BLACKWOOD EVIL
Produced and Directed by Richard Catt
Jane Fox – Joan Kudrle
Travis Taylor – Michael Paul
Margret Fellows – Peggy Catt
Eddie Johnson – Richard CattEarlier this year a video was hand delivered to television station WBWE in Texas. The tape appeared during the shift change and the office staff doesn’t know who dropped it off. The contents are something they will never forget, the death of two station staff members, reporter Jane Fox and cameraman Eddie Johnson as well as the last moments of Psychic Margret Fellows and land developer Travis Taylor, Jr.
Jane was researching the roots of supernatural legends surrounding an area of Texas known as the Black Lands. After exploring some of the more infamous areas of the Black Lands, Jane planned to explore the events that took place in the now abandoned Taylor House by having psychic Margret Fellows reveal the events that launched the house’s haunting. Along to document the events on video is her cameraman Eddie. What the group didn’t plan on was landowner Taylor supervising the night’s activities to ensure that the group didn’t damage his property.
The resulting video is a well-acted and especially creepy chronicle of the night’s activities in Taylor House. Director Catt does a fine job creating an atmosphere of dread and fear. He allows the character to carry the action. They don’t react to the environment, the environment reacts to them, something that was missing from this years big budget haunted house spectacles. The only problem is that Catt lets some of the scenes drag on a little too long to make their point and this really slows down some of the earlier sequences. A little tightening would help the pacing. Although, when the action does kick in, it moves at a breakneck pace.
As an actor, Michael Paul is fantastic as Travis Taylor and it will be a shame if he is overlooked at this year’s B-Movie Awards. Paul brings the right amount of smarmy-ness to Taylor, a man who possibly had a hand in the events that led up to the haunting. He pulls his performance from anger and rage rather than greed or annoyance.
Joan Kudrle’s Jane Fox is the perfect foil to Paul’s Taylor. Kudrle plays Fox as a rather geekish and headstrong woman whose zealousness will be her undoing. She has a stand out scene at the end of the film. It bears more than a resemblance to Heather Donahue’s confessional in The Blair Witch, only this scene ends how Donahue’s should have. I won’t spoil it for you, the scene’s payoff is perfect. It provides a good ending to good movie.
Order Blackwood Evil directly from the official website.