FrightFest Halloween review – Every Heavy Thing

FrightFest Halloween review – Every Heavy Thing

Oklahoma-based writer-director Mickey Reece has an extensive filmography of shorts and features.  On the strength of the features I’ve seen from him – Climate of the Hunter, Agnes – he’s a distinctive genre auteur, and I’d like to delve deeper into his backlist (a few posters on view in Every Heavy Thing are from his earlier stuff).  This is a serial killer cyber thriller, but also a skewed look at a divided America – it takes place in High Town City, which aspires to have a tech boom thanks to an influx of techbros like William Shaffer (James Urbaniak) but is inevitably haunted by its underbelly, the easy-to-ignore Low Town.

Women have been disappearing, though we know early on that Shaffer is just shooting them in the head – he has the kind of lifestyle whereby he lives in a mansion in such isolation that nobody passes by to notice the shrouded corpses piled in his unfilled swimming pool.  While the town is focused on tech stuff and shrugging off the disappearances, oldschool media struggles on – as an alt-weekly magazine still rolls off the presses, or is painfully coughed out of a colour printer.  Ad sales drone Joe (Josh Fadem) is in a rut with his nurse girlfriend Lux (Tipper Newton) and tends to just tune out her conversation, an effect which gets worse when a device stuck into his brain by Sheffer means that he gets to experience the serial killer’s dreams and hear his voice in his skull.  Joe and a co-worker go to a club to review an act by singer Whitney Bluewill (Barbara Crampton), who shockingly becomes Sheffer’s victim in the parking lot – after which Sheffer crawls into Joe’s car (and sticks him with his implant), allowing him to go free by stating that if he tells anyone about this he’ll be dead inside an hour.  Already a squirming loser, Joe finds his situation worse when his editor (John Ennis) gives him the gig of chauffeuring non-driving new hire Cheyenne (Kaylene Snarsky) to Low Town to interview a witness who accuses Sheffer of being the disappearer.

Reece handcrafts his films, and this has a distinctive, retro look – grainy/gritty with lo-fi effects like Sheffer’s plugs-and-wires cyber-helmet, given to Lynchian noir asides but with a strong throughline.  Every Heavy Thing is brilliantly cast – Fadem and Urbaniak make a matched pair of sub and dom, with the victim eventually exposing the limitations of the would-be mastermind (‘you only murder women – why is that?’) … and you get star-quality from Crampton (crooning breathily), Newton (technically, too obviously interesting to be ignored – but maybe that’s the point), Snarsky and People’s Joker director Vera Drew as Joe’s only friend from school.