Ash and Bone stars Angelina Danielle Cama as Cassie, a troubled teen whose father (Wallen) and his girlfriend (Kaiti Wallen) take her to a cabin his family has in rural Michigan to get her away from the trouble she's in. The problem is, Cassie has a way of finding trouble wherever she goes, and this time she meets a young couple at a local bar and convinces them to break into a scary farm house owned by a scary brother and sister who may or may not be kidnapping and torturing young women at their place. Spoiler alert: they are, and when they get home they find Cassie and her new friends there. They escape, but the brother and sister won't let this go so easily. Like Q bringing the Enterprise in contact with the Borg, Cassie has set in motion a season finale cliff hanger of epic proportions.
Out of the three films of Wallen's we've covered here now, this one works the best for me. Yes, the end meandered a bit, but considering his films usually clock in at 100+ minutes at a minimum, and sometimes close in on two hours, this one at 97 minutes had a leaner feel that really worked in its favor. From there, Wallen with his cinematographer Alex Gasparetto do a great job framing scenes and individual shots--something that I thought he could've leaned on more in Abstruse he really does a great job of here. We also get great performances, a few standouts for me included Cama as Cassie, Wallen as the naive, affluent city-dweller dad, Erika Hoveland as the sister of the serial killer siblings, and then Jamie Bernadette as the local cigarette smoking young woman who seems like she's already been beaten down by this isolated small town. Finally, I'll need to get into some spoilers, so be warned if you read further that I'll be giving away the film, but getting into Bret Miller's story, I liked the way we're given Cassie as a sympathetic figure to start, but as it goes on, we see that she's the cause of a lot of destruction in the lives of the people she comes into contact with. Without that, this feels like a two-part episode of a CBS procedural like Criminal Minds, which wouldn't have been horrible, but I liked the ambiguity Cassie's role gave us. Also, the fact that most of the victims are in some way complicit in their own demise: Cassie's friend Tina (Calhoun Koenig) doesn't need to jump in the stolen police car with Cassie, but she does; her dad didn't want to believe his daughter was the bad influence, but if he had, they wouldn't have gone to that remote Michigan town; and the young couple could have told Cassie no when she said she wanted to break into the scary farm house. They all let Cassie manipulate them, with disastrous results. It took what I thought was going to be a scary slasher film and made it something more.
Harley Wallen definitely embodies the independent spirit of movie making, which I really appreciate, and which really comes through in this. I think the big difference between his films and some of the other indie films we look at is length. Motern Media's films usually clock in around 88 minutes. Shogun's around 90. Cinema Epoch/Cineridge's even shorter, with ones in the 75-minute range. When I see a Wallen film on Tubi and it's 105-minutes to potentially closing in on 120, it's a bigger investment--like Abstruse, which was 117 minutes. Part of the reason why I think his films tend to go longer though, is he has a message in them he wants to deliver, and he doesn't want to lose any part of that message. I get that, and I respect it, but where I think this movie worked better for me, was the messages here were more under the surface for me to take with me after I've thought about it more. One big one that he used in both Abstruse and Eternal Code, is the idea that in our society some lives are worth more than others, but in those films it was more the main driver of those stories, while here it was underneath the surface of a tense horror thriller. It's like you get this relief that Wallen's character and his family survive, but what about all the poor girls that didn't? Or that the thing that caused the serial killing siblings' downfall was that they attacked some rich people from the city, but then you as the viewer have to juxtapose that on your own with the idea that they were okay killing girls who were runaways, those girls probably escaping something horrible at home only to end up dying a horrible death. You don't get that in your usual slasher, so it was a welcome surprise to have that kind of depth.
We're now at 11 Mel Novak films on the site. Here he plays the owner of a local bar, and while the role is scant, it has that vibe of the impartial observer who doesn't get involved in the town's business, but he has a sense of what's going on. I think for what this role was, it enhanced the film enough, gave it that little extra that an indie flick like this would want by having him in this part. We actually haven't seen him since 2020's review of An Hour to Kill, another one that producer Joe Williamson asked us to cover. In looking at Novak's IMDb bio, while probably more of his newer stuff will probably only come to us through further review requests, he also has some stuff from the 90s and early 2000s that we haven't hit yet either, so this isn't the last we've seen of him here. He kind of fits that Charles Napier/Richard Lynch category, where we don't necessarily seek his films out, but he stars with enough people that we do seek out, that we end up seeing him enough on here--and to further the comp, Lynch has 13 tags, and Napes 12, so Novak's 11 is right in line with them.
Another twist for me was how, what starts out as your usual "who wants to see some pretty women get killed in horrible ways" kind of film, turns into almost a female empowerment movie. The male characters reveal themselves to be the weaker ones, whether it's Tucker (Mason Heidger), the boy in the young couple Cassie befriends, who gives up his girlfriend's (Bernadette) location, and then gives up Cassie's location to our baddies; or Wallen, who both can't decide whether he wants to let his daughter tell him what to do, or his new girlfriend, but even when he has a gun, it's his daughter Cassie who uses it to save them; or the brother (Jimmy Doom) in the brother-sister serial killer duo, who at first seems to be telling his sister, Hoveland, what to do, but really it's her that's pulling the strings; and then finally it's Cassie who saves her family. This isn't just some kind of Final Girl construct Wallen's leaning on, even though this film easily could've gone in that direction, the male characters are consistently weaker than their female counterparts. Even in the opening scene, where we see the young lady trying to escape the serial killers, I didn't think anything of it at the time, but it's the sister who catches her by shooting the victim first, so the brother can finish her off. The thing that keeps it from fully being a female empowerment movie is the same thing that keeps the thread of "some lives are worth more than others:" the fact that so many unfortunate girls are killed by these baddies.
Finally, while the other two Wallen films we've looked at on here took place in Michigan too, they could've taken place anywhere. This one, on the other hand, uses Michigan in a way that really works. I've only ever been to Michigan the one time I had to switch plans at the Detroit airport, which doesn't really count, so it's not like I'm intimately familiar with it, but there's enough ground laid by the story and scenery in this movie that I didn't need to be for it to work for me. We see so many films made in Michigan now, but so few of them use Michigan as part of the story, which to me feels like a wasted opportunity, especially with the state's tragedies and triumphs being so well documented. The abandoned buildings in Detroit that provide the playground for a trouble-making teen like Cassie, the remnants of a city that was once the engine that drove the nation; but at the same time, Cassie is the child of an upper class that also has remnants, and those remnants still exist in a way that the rest of the state, especially the rural areas, both respect and resent it. It's another area where this movie gives us a little more. This easily could've existed in a fictitious setting, and probably would've worked out fine; but by using Michigan this way, it becomes another character, one that plays an important role in how the film unfolds.
And with that, I'll wrap this up. If, looking at the cover, you're coming to this for another film about pretty young women getting killed in gruesome ways, you'll be disappointed; but if you're coming for a suspense thriller that gives you more than that in the story and performances, I think you'll be happy with this. As of right now it's available on Prime and Tubi, so I'd give it a shot on one of those.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10015244
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