CASSADAGA: A Dark Piece Of Horror Porn With A Micro-Budget

Made two years ago but releasing in my area today:

CASSADAGA (Dir. Anthony DiBlasi, 2011)

In the first two minutes of Anthony DiBlasi’s CASSADAGA, involving a mother reacting violently to catching her preteen son wearing girl’s clothing, you
can tell exactly what kind of movie this is - a dark piece of horror porn with a micro-budget.

That’s not such a bad thing, especially this time of year
with Halloween coming up, but genre fans looking for a cheap thrills gore-fest will likely be
bored by this offering.

Kelen Coleman (The Newsroom, The Mindy Project) plays
a deaf art teacher whose young sister (Sarah Sculco) is killed when hit by a car in the
parking lot of their school. Coleman relocates to the spiritualist community of Cassadaga
University, called “The Psychic Capital of America” on its welcome sign. We’re never told what state
the film is set in, but it was shot in Orlando, Florida if that means anything.

Coleman is shown around the grounds and to her new living
quarters by Louise Fletcher as Cassadaga’s head mistress, who tells her not to mind her
grandson Thomas (a barely seen Lucas Beck), who keeps to himself on the upper floor. That last
bit of info wouldn’t make anyone nervous, right?

Coleman begins dating a suave Emergency Medical
Technician (Kevin Alejandro of True Blood), the father of one of her students, and on their
first date they decide to go to a séance conducted by a medium played by Avis-Marie Barnes.
Despite her deafness, Coleman hears her sister’s voice in her mind, but another spirit, that of a
murdered girl gone missing in the area four years ago, gets in the way.

From then on Coleman is tormented, by way of jolting
gruesome in-your-face imagery and gross incidents involving maggots, and any viewer can put
together the pieces faster than the characters that this is the spirit’s way of giving clues
to her killer’s identity.

Meanwhile we catch glimpses of another woman (Christina
Bach) being abducted and having her limbs dismembered then reattached to form what could
certainly be considered a macabre marionette.

None of this is as frightening as it sounds as the pace
is as slow as Coleman is trying to craw away from an attacker in a bloody butcher’s apron in one
of the extremely anti-climatic final scenes.

First time screenwriters Bruce Wood and Scott Poiley have
obviously put a lot of thought into the plot mechanics here with the unraveling of the
mystery, but the film can’t seem to decide whether to be a tense melodrama or a slasher thriller,
and it ends up being neither successfully.

And why cast Louise Fletcher, who won the Oscar for her
iconic performance as Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” almost four decades
ago, and is no newbie to the world of horror (see: THE EXORCIST II, FIRESTARTER, and FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC for starters), if you’re not going to do anything with her? A
scene in which Fletcher smokes pot with Coleman during one of the film’s many downtimes is about
as unnecessary as you can get.

Coleman is a very attractive presence, and it’s nice to
see her get a chance to show that she has more range than allowed in her supporting roles on
television, but the material forces her to embarrassingly overact at times, and I’m really not sure
how the film benefitted at all by making her character deaf. Add that to the list of unnecessary
elements on display here.

Still, there’s some promise in the writing. If Wood and
Poiley can tighten up their narrative to alleviate the tedium in future projects, they may be able
to create something much scarier than this cliché ridden slog.

More later...