Carriages travelling through mist-shrouded woods, candlelit jaunts down darkened hallways. Gypsy curses and werewolves, mobs of fearful villagers with torches, haughty nobles with blood on their hands... It's been a while since I've seen something as gothic as Eight for Silver (apparently known as the way more generic The Curse in some territories.)
It opens in World War one, in the trenches of Somme. An officer is riddled with bullets, and when the doctors start removing them, they're surprised to find a silver bullet buried in him. The explanation demands we go back thirty five years and to rural France*.
There we find a train of Romani caravans settling down near a wealthy chateau. The lords of the land, headed by Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie) are not happy with their settlement there, especially when they may have a valid claim. So they hire a group of mercenaries and kill them all - a scene captured dispassionately, from a distance, in one long, brutal take.
The leaders of the gypsies are given particularly nasty ends - one gets his extremities hacked off and stuffed with straw and is crucified as a sort of horrific scarecrow to deter future squatters, and the matriarch is buried alive. But as is usually the case in these movies, she manages to curse these asshole nobles with her dying breath; Luckily, she was prepared for this eventuality and had cast a silver set of wolf's teeth from the silver that Judas was paid for betraying Jesus. Yeah, just roll with it.
Soon everyone nearby - not just those who were a party to it - are having nightmares of the massacre, leading them to the scarecrow and the set of silver teeth buried beneath him. The children are particularly affected; after one of the local kids discovers the dentures, he uses them to bite... none other than the noble's son Edward (Max MacKintosh).
Edward gets violently ill as the wound seemingly gets infected, and runs off into the night; search parties are mounted for him, unsuccessfully. In the ensuing days, a feral beast starts killing off locals, starting with the kid that used the dentures to bite Edward. Hmm.
Right about then a pathologist (Boyd Holbrook) arrives in town - he's been tracing the Roma clan for a while, after an incident in a distant town (a reference to the beast of Gévaudan!) where he became acquainted with the sort of menace the locals are facing - though he keeps his cards very close to his chest. Thankfully he's also an ace tracker and hunter, so he starts organizing the local defenses against the beast - later beasts.
It's a strange old movie, one that wears its influences on its sleeves: The more gothic old Hammer films come to mind, obviously, but also a little bit of Nightmare on Elm Street (the sins of the fathers angle, a creepy nursery rhyme, and, of course, the nightmares), and a whole lot more of The Thing. The very messy werewolf curse here owes more to that than any other actual werewolf movie, and there's a funny direct reference with an old-timey microscope. Sadly, the pathologist does not spill a glass of ale into the innards of a chess-playing mechanical Turk. Hopefully they're saving that for the sequel.
While the style is stately and deeply gothic, it's only deceptively tasteful; The genre stuff is spread thin, but it's all wholly unreputable and of great quality. The violence is grim and gory, and the CGI-assisted practical creature effects are excellent.
This clash of styles is one of the film's greatest assets. Writer/director/cinematographer Sean Ellis acquits himself beautifully on his technical responsibilities, using an obviously higher than usual budget within horror to capture the mist-drenched countryside in a way that's sumptuously atmospheric. There's a single misstep where a few of the scenes are shot with a slight distortion to make them more intense, but other than that it's one seriously good-looking film.
The script doesn't fare as well. I don't mind the way time unmoors at the beginning and the end in the film's pseudo-framing device - it's pointless, sure, but it's very well made and fits within the film's more artistic pretensions.
Propping up hoary old gipsy prejudice is a little harder to take - I'm happy to chalk it up to following conventions, but it's still not a great look. No, what bothered me is a strange incompleteness to the script, which feels both overbaked and undernourished at the same time.
There's a lot of focus on extraneous elements and cheesy jump scares, and plot developments often seem arbitrary. The scope seems to be a lot bigger at the beginning, with a whole tableful of wealthy elite bastards to get revenge on - they do pop up once more in the middle of the movie, but other than that the action remains focused on just one of them while the rest remain free of any sort of comeuppance. And I didn't like the whole focus on saving one of the werewolf victims while the rest perished miserably, it felt like it ran against what much of the film seemed to be about- as if children of noble blood were intrinsically worth more than others.
Still, it's an engaging, great-looking movie that delivers some surprisingly grisly horror.
*: According to Wikipedia - the film never makes this explicit, and while watching the movie I was sure it was set in the UK or Ireland.
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