FrightFest review – Remanente Voltagem (Remanence: A Voltage Cosmic Horror)
Brazilian director-writer-effects guy Kapel Furman made the gruesome supernatural slasher movie Skull: The Mask. This follow-up is a venture into Lovecraftian cosmic horror – every other FF film this year seems worried about what can ‘come through’ from a parallel dimension – but still essentially an old-fashioned monster movie in the tradition of the many vintage posters stuck up on a little girl’s bedroom wall.
The film opens with the little girl, Clara (Cecilia Guedes), asking her babysitter to tell her a monster story, and being very specific about the ingredients (even the moral) she wants. Hilma (Carolina Cardinale) recounts the story of something which happened in the city of Novo Hamburgo in 1961, shown in black and white, with Anton (Mauro Schames) – named either after Dr Phibes or Anton Bitel who suffers more than most annually during FrightFest – constructing an electrical device out of expensive materials in order to reach his dead wife, only to turn himself into an electrified skeleton man and make a breach in reality. As it happens, Clara’s paramedic father Demian (Ricardo Oliveira) and his partner Victor (Ricardo Gelli) are called to the site of Anton’s former laboratory where a woman (Clarissa Kiste) has suffered electric burns while unearthing gold objects from a well. Demian has lately lost his wife and seems about to lose his home to a rapacous insurance company which seems more objectively evil than, say, Cthulhu … and Victor is a high-living spiv who just wants more cash to impress his high-end girlfriend.
The duo overcome qualms and enter the well, discovering Anton’s lair, lots more gold jewelry of vaguely Aztec design, and a big electrical device sealing the cosmic void. Yes, stealing the gold opens the portal and raises Anton – and Furman stages a race around the city with gruesome incidents, imperilled innocents and just enough emotional heft to make it more than just a series of splatter riffs. This is seldom scary, though it does have plenty of Evil Dead-style grue – Anton makes one victim’s heart explode out of his chest – and there’s a decent enough bedtime story moral about unearned riches being literally shockingly deadly.
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