{"id":39501,"date":"2023-10-20T17:55:27","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T21:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=39501"},"modified":"2023-10-20T18:15:01","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T22:15:01","slug":"archaon-the-halloween-summoning-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/20\/archaon-the-halloween-summoning-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Archaon: The Halloween Summoning (2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’m all for more horror movies that are set on or around Halloween, but there should be more behind it. Despite the inclusion of Celtic folklore and Halloween mythology, Paul Ernest\u2019s horror thriller is a bust. There\u2019s a good concept behind \u201cArchaon: The Halloween Summoning.\u201d It\u2019s just that the movie itself does absolutely nothing with it. It\u2019s a horror movie that basks in its glacial pacing and paper thin, unlikable characters.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jackson (Josh Scherer) has just ordered a Halloween costume in the form of an ancient 15th<\/sup> century Celtic mask that’s so authentic that it comes with instructions that he and his buddy Pete (Christopher Dalton) ignore. Jackson\u2019s overbearing brother Nolan (Garrett Miller) decides to throw a Halloween party, where he intends to invite his crush Sara (Sarah Zanotti). Despite weird hallucinations, and some mysterious legends behind the mask, the events elevate when they throw their annual Halloween party, coincidentally, the night when the evil spirit threatens to be resurrected. D\u2019oh!<\/p>\n

A movie like this could really elicit some serious terror, especially in how it delves in to ancient Halloween lore, but Paul Ernest can never seem to deliver a good enough pay off. The mystery is anemic, and I didn\u2019t give two squats about anyone facing off against this weird artifact. Oddly enough none of the characters are never in any real danger, despite being informed over and over that Archaon is a \u201cpowerful demon.\u201d Weirdly, director Ernest has a great time making use of \u201cThe Inception\u2019s\u201d sound \u201cBraaam!\u201d, setting it off almost every minute, as a means of eliciting mock suspense, setting the sound effect off any moment that he wants the audience to be scared.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s almost like a Pavlov exercise: \u201cBraaaam!\u201d Oh something bad\u2019s going to happen! It not only gets exhausting very quickly, but it\u2019s patently lazy. Speaking of lazy, one of the main elements of the narrative is that the mask, when put on, warps you in to another world. Director Ernest completely rips off \u201cStranger Things\u201d wholesale, as characters are transported in to a menacing mirror world called \u201cThe In-Between.\u201d Ernest doesn\u2019t even shy away from the obvious inspiration, as the \u201cIn-Between\u201d even looks like a low rent version of \u201cThe Upside Down.\u201d As for Archaon, it is dull like most of the film.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no real menace or sense of urgency and the monster only appears sporadically to frighten Jackson, who responds by screeching like a house cat. The monster we see advertised on the film\u2019s poster is not even present, with the villain looking more like a scarecrow demon prop from Party City. The only thing of consequence that happens is one character dies, and funnily enough, it\u2019s the only minority character with zero lines of dialogue. He literally shows up to the Halloween party (filled with obvious thirty somethings playing college students) to die. Ernest could have also gone over the film a few more times during editing as the sound is awful.<\/p>\n

One moment finds Jackson explaining to character Sara what it feels like to wear the mask, and the audio inexplicably lowers to where we can barely make out what they\u2019re discussing. This is an error that really should have been corrected in the final stages. \u201cArchaon\u201d is a stale, tedious genre entry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m all for more horror movies that are set on or around Halloween, but there should be more behind it. Despite the inclusion of Celtic folklore and Halloween mythology, Paul Ernest\u2019s horror thriller is a bust. There\u2019s a good concept behind \u201cArchaon: The Halloween Summoning.\u201d It\u2019s just that the movie itself does absolutely nothing with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[441,477,501,703,1013,1087],"class_list":["post-39501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-halloween-horror-month","category-movie-reviews","tag-halloween","tag-horror","tag-indie-film","tag-mystery","tag-suspense","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39501"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41425,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39501\/revisions\/41425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}