HISTORY OF EVIL (2024)

New streaming on Shudder!
Directed/Written by Bo Mirhosseni.
Starring Paul Wesley, Jackie Cruz, Zachary Branch, Ralph Rodriguez, Tordy Clark, Victoria Harris, Preston Flagg, Rhonda Johnson Dents, Jason Box, Ryan Baughman, Kyle Porter, Nathan Hartley, Murphee Bloom, Dan Winkowski, Tevin Marbeth
Check out the trailer here!!

In the near future, everything sucks and America is bad. The only hope for humanity is a group of brown and female people who refer to themselves as the Revolution. Unfortunately, Prince is not in the movie. The Revolutionaries attempt to spread the word of the Revolution because that’s what Revolutionaries do, travelling under the cover of the forests and holing up in an old, dark house. Also, did I say America is bad? Oh and there are ghosts.

I’m sorry but I hate films that wear their politics on their sleeve. Just from reading the synopsis of HISTORY OF EVIL, I knew politics was going to be front and center of this one. But since it was a Shudder release and usually they have a pretty good choice of films on a consistent basis, I went against by better judgment and watched it anyway.

Aside from being so left-leaning that it topples over from a slight breeze from the East, the main problem with HISTORY OF EVIL is that it fails to really deliver any character whatsoever. People are who they are at face value and very little else. The revolutionaries are brown and female, mostly, so obviously they are good. Most of the military are white good old boys who take a little too much joy in the power they have and the guns they have to back that power up. They’re all just walking cliches, making it very hard to care about any of them. Simply what they look like isn’t enough make you care, yet this movie seems to want to make it that way.

You don’t even get to know the members of the revolution other than the fact that we are told that they are important for the future. Paul Wesley (from THE VAMPIRE DIARIES and also STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS) plays Ron who at the beginning reunites his wife Alegre (ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK’s Jackie Cruz) with their daughter. For most of the film, Alegre is trying to reconnect with a daughter who hasn’t had her mom in her life. So the three are trying to reestablish their new family. But there is no chemistry between Ron and Alegre. They rarely share the screen together or a quiet moment between them to establish any connection. And with reuniting the family being such a major goal, that’s a problem. Especially when Ron keeps on going out to the bomb shelter to talk with the ghost of a former member of the KKK every chance he gets once they get to the old, dark house. So much effort and time is spent on the destruction of this family unit that the film forgets to let us know why they are together in the first place.

The ghosts in HISTORY OF EVIL almost feel like an afterthought. It’s as if writer/director Bo Mirhosseni downloaded every hysterical, worst-case scenario from cable news into his script; checkpoints where you have to swear allegiance to ‘merica on a digital bible, skies filled with military helicopters, an underground railroad established to transport those wanted as rebels who don’t follow the oppressive laws of the land. Oh yeah, and then there’re ghosts in the safehouse they are staying in. Because he is white, Ron visits the Klansman in the Bomb Shelter way too many times, paving the way for the cliched betrayal of the father to his family that has been established in every haunted house movie from THE AMITYVILLE HORROR to POLTERGEIST to INSIDIOUS to most recently NIGHT SWIM. Play a new song, haunted house movies!

Simply put, when you don’t know the characters, you don’t care about them. HISTORY OF EVIL is so heavy-handed its knuckles drag on the ground. When the film isn’t focused on the fascist military hunting down poor, persecuted revolutionaries, we are treated with one long discourse after another between two or more characters about what’s wrong with the country, why it got that way, and what direction is should head to next. The script is all ideas or fears of what a totalitarian government might be and forgets to add in details that actually make us give a shit about those affected by it. It’s all hysterical dire scenario situations amped to 11, but there’s no investment because everything seems to be stated without emotion or depth or anyone to adhere investment to.

I fear a new onslaught of politicized horror is on its way with the election coming and especially after Alex Garland’s CIVIL WAR releases. Sometimes that can be cool. David Cronenberg was able to have some political commentary in CRIMES OF THE FUTURE and his son did the same in INFINITY POOL. These commentaries on the state of the current world were so potent because it had character, worked with metaphor, and remembered to not get so steeped in current politics that it immediately dates your film and has people fleeing to their political corners for solace after watching. Unfortunately, there are way too many people out there who aren’t as talented as the Cronenbergs who feel the need to plaster their political beliefs on the screen with little to no metaphorical veil, which immediately offends and dispels half of the audience. Left or right, I hate those types of films and HISTORY OF EVIL is one of them. If you actually have individual thought, skip HISTORY OF EVIL. It relies too much on the type of regurgitated hyperbole way too many people get from all of the news channels as its backbone. And too little about being entertaining and even worse, giving us a story with characters to care about.