Beezel
Beezel
Beezel: The ancient family abode has a story to tell to those willing to lend an ear. The flickering lights within the combustion chamber. Your father’s favourite seat. The frightening cannibalistic witch in the storage room.
Let us start with Beezel, which incorporates six decades within one house, plus the different generations of the same family, together with the outsiders they bring within. Within that core is Beezel herself, an amazing mass of efectos and prosthetics which give an otherwise completely freakish looking creature.
It is almost an anthology film, with four episodes each in 1966, 1987, 2003 and 2013. The connective tissue and repetitive elements of the house and Beezel herself are enough to create a multi-decade timeline, still the film remains non-linear and unfocused.
…And we open the saga in the year 1966, with the seemingly charming Weems Family too, deep inside the house. The images fade out with a click as the film on the reel comes to an end, and then another set of images comes up in its place: a boy and his mother playing, with his father probably holding the camera.
It’s a short clip, with a rather abrupt and unceremonious chain of occurrences which helps to set the mood of the remaining portion of the film. Beezel has a skill of controlling when the mayhem should be unleashed with cracks of blood, but it is not an unbroken stream that dose so.
Fast forward twenty-one years and Harold Weems (Bob Gallagher), husband and father now grown sixty years old, is the only witness to ( and suspect) the massacre, the events of which were seen in 1966.
Deloris (Kimberly Salditt Poulin) is the second current wife whom he lives inside a house and frightens the local children who think there is a witch in that structure. However in order to clear the accusations, he proceeds to hire a documentary filmmaker called Apollo, (LeJon Woods) who visits the house to hear his side of the accusations.
The narration then takes a leap twenty years ahead to the year two thousand and three when Thelma is now elderly and on her deathbed in the home. One particular night a new home health aide, Naomi Caroline Quigley, reports for duty only to learn that the last nurse in charge has gone missing.
Coming back to the events in year two thousand and twelve: finally, there is Deloris’s son Lucas, (Nicolas Robin) and daughter-in-law Nova (Victoria Fratz Fradkin, who also co-wrote the film) visiting the house with an intention to sort through her things and prepare the house for sale. That last storyline is of greater significance as well as of a brighter future.
Lucas, who has remained baffled and hurt by the choices that his mother made, has never been to the house nor has he met Harold Weems the husband of his mother now deceased – who resided in that house. He says that Deloris turned into a member of some cult when she wed Harold and went on to dedicate herself, and the house to him rather than raise him.
Regrettably, this film is less concerned with Lucas against the backdrop of the house and more interested in how the house starts to affect his wife Nova. It is engaging, but it is completely underutilized with this interesting plot.
Befitting a horror movie rooted in the denization of the location as well as Bijan,, the movie also is not very concerned with the back story of Beezel herself. One doesn’t even learn the sequence of her getting into the house, how come she is trapped in the basement, whether she rents or not etc. She’s simply there and will remain so indefinitely, and if this is your house then she is yours.
Yes, there are in fact situations where perhaps due to lack of definite knowledge, some things and events appear more appalling than they actually are. Although in this instance, it would not hurt to have just that little extra background information in the form of Bezel’s back story and the family’s experience with her.
There are a few interludes here and there of real style and oomph, especially at the beginning of the film, as well as one scene in the third act where somebody gets sick which is a good thing because I enjoyed it so much. Each of the segments uses some form of technology that emulated the decade in which it was set: so there are home movie reels of the 60s, a camcorder in the 80s, a recording device in 2003 and lastly a compact video camera in 2013.
The film does not seek to further elaborate on each period, as most of the costuming, hair, and makeup, transitional as they were, seems to bring the styles of the late 80s and mid-00s nearer to each other than further apart. One could argue it is a wasted chance, still, the occasional lease to other cameras not used to follow the drama via a more found-footage style is still a fun bit of business.
Beezel is the second feature from directors Fradkin and Fratz Fradkin through their production company Social House films. They have more than millions of views and a few hundred thousand followers and have web shared over two dozen horror shorts via YouTube.
They know how to make a great b-grade looking movie with pretty nasty violence. It’s definitely not the most well developed plot in any movie, but for the fans of the horror genre, there’s something to appreciate for decades throughout the film.
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- Genre: horror, Thriller
- Country: United States
- Director: Aaron Fradkin
- Cast: Bob Gallagher, LeJon Woods, Nicolas Robin
