Wanna hear something stupid? For the longest time, whenever surfing Netflix for something to kill a few hours, I repeatedly skipped right over The Block Island Sound, never pausing to read the synopsis because the title suggested some kind of hipster music doc about indie artists I’d never throw on my turntable. In my defense, there’s so much crap on Netflix that if I stopped to check out every movie summary, I’d spend more time looking for something on Netflix than actually watching something on Netflix.
But one night, I accidentally left the thumbnail for The Block Island Sound highlighted. While I’m personally annoyed by Netflix’s practice of playing a scene from the film whether you want it to or not, I was suddenly intrigued. Oh…this is a horror film. And as it turned out, a pretty good one.
The first thing that struck me was the overall aesthetic, which effectively captures the inherent bleakness of small north-coastal towns. The ones that aren’t tourist traps are typically dreary and cold, seemingly drained of color, with perpetually gray skies. Like such horror films as Dead & Buried and the criminally underseen The Beach House, the setting of this one immediately establishes an ominous tone…
…as does the opening scene, where an old man named Tom (Neville Archambault) wakes up on the deck of his adrift fishing boat surrounded by dead fish. Later, he frequently falls into a trance-like state before waking up on his boat again. His son, Harry (Chris Sheffield), fears Tom is sleepwalking, at least until the morning they find his wayward boat empty. Short-tempered and suspicious, he assumes Dad met with foul play, especially after he’s found dead. Conversely, Harry’s semi-estranged sister Audrey (Michaela McManus), who’s there to investigate the mysterious deaths of thousands of fish, is certain the man’s chronic drinking killed him.
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| Sometimes having a bigger boat doesn't matter. |
For a low budget film, writer/directors Kevin & Matthew McManus manage to assemble a pretty engaging Lovecraftian tale. With limited resources, the overall lack of onscreen monsters and mayhem is offset by a consistently dark tone, menacing sound effects and, most importantly, believable characters. However, the film loses some of its punch during the final act, when the nature of this entity is revealed and visual effects are required. Not that they’re necessarily bad, but aesthetically, these scenes seem to belong to another movie. Ultimately, it’s most effective when the horror is more psychological than supernatural.
Catching The Block Island Sound turned out to be a happy accident. It’s an eerie, quietly unsettling little horror film, which is certainly more fun than another music doc about obscure musicians. It’s still on Netflix (and has been for years), but you never know when it’ll get yanked. And since the movie is probably worth seeing more than once, it’s nice to have it on Blu-ray with a good video/audio transfer and some interesting bonus features, which help one appreciate what the McManus brothers are able to accomplish with so little.
EXTRA KIBBLES
FEATURETTES - A Practical Apocalypse; Finding the Cast; Filming on the Water; Special Effects on a Shoestring.
AUDIO COMMENTARY - By writer/directors Kevin & Matthew McManus
BEHIND THE SCENES FOOTAGE
MCMANUS FAMILY HOME MOVIES
TRAILER
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