FrightFest review – The Pitchfork Retreat
Written by director Gregory Van Voorhis and star Nicole Van Voorhis, The Pitchfork Retreat is an Amicus-style anthology – with Tony Todd in the tradition of Peter Cushing’s Dr Terror, Burgess Meredith’s Dr Diabolo and Ralph Richardson’s Crypt Keeper, though the film digs a bit deeper into the motiviations of its three guests for spinning their particular tales. Taking advantage of the anthology format’s need for actors who can make an impression in only a few minutes and turn up for work for only a few days (or hours), the film is cast in depth with the sorts of names you might find at a convention – Adrienne Barbeau, Danielle Harris, Dee Wallace, Andrew Divoff, Terry Kiser, Austin Pendleton – who all brighten things up in fairly small roles and give the film the crowded, engaging air of Amicus or TV shows like Tales From the Darkside … at once comfort viewing and nightmare fuel. Todd, to whom the film is dedicated, is on familiar territory for him, but brings a gravitas and (finally) a cold anger which springs one of the film’s traps.
Matt (Lukas Hassel), Mandy (Nicole Van Voorhis) and Nikolai (Joseph D. Reitman) are ferried by small boat to an island where the Host (Todd) and attendants welcome them to ‘the Pitchfork Retreat’, which seems to be an Arvon-style intensive course for budding horror writers with a sinister competition element. The three candidates are wary of each other and also display their own tics, with nightmare/flashback glimpses suggesting the traumas that might incline them to write horror stories – a genre which the film seems to imply is a natural for deeply troubled, probably dangerous folks (which isn’t my experience of horror writers in general or in retreats like this – though who knows what goes on after the lights go out and I’m sure Ramsey Campbell has seventeen postmen buried in his basement). This stretch of the film drops a lot of hints and builds a lot of character, but also holds things back. The pitchfork motif is suggestive, as is the ferryman, and sitting around a firepit dreaming up nasty stories also hints that we’re not so far from the Crypt Keeper’s Crypt or Dr Terror’s railway carriage.
Then, at a table, the three stories are told … all exercises in familiar, yet welcome sub-genres … a child is threatened by possession, ghosts/zombies want revenge on a guilty party, a vampire hunter is pursued by an old enemy. That would be enough for Milton Subotsky, but each tale here gets a set of footnotes, some fill-in material, and a reveal about the true-life inspiration … in each case suggesting that the storyteller has skewed things to put themselves in a better light and gone to some lengths to conceal secrets which the film has discreetly set up. A strength of the film is that the individual tales work as regular horror genre pieces, with the doppelganger targettng a happy family a particularly nasty piece of work. There are just enough cue-the-lightning EC Comics monster moments to pay off the set-ups and the later mental rearrangements necessary to explain what’s really been going on under the surface don’t detract from the simple pleasures of heh-heh-heh spookery. Hassel, N. Van Voorhis and Reitman are all interesting too, demonstrating serious range by playing at least three versions of their characters – all undergoing extreme stresses and changes.
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