Beneath Us All stars Angelina Danielle Cama (from other Harley Wallen flicks Eternal Code, Abstruse, and the aforementioned Ash and Bone) as Julie, a young lady living in foster care in Maine who's about to age out of the system. Social worker Rebecca (Kaiti Wallen, also from the previous three Wallen films I mentioned) suspects something's up with her foster parents (Sean Whalen and Maria Olsen) and the way they care for Julie and her foster siblings, so she decides to keep a closer eye on her, which is fortuitous, because Julie finds a pendant in the woods, which unearths a long-buried Viking vampire, whom Julie nurses back to health, not knowing his sinister intentions. Will Rebecca be able to save Julie from this situation and get her the life she deserves after foster care?
First and foremost, we need to get the spoiler alerts out there. I can't discuss what I liked and didn't like without giving things away, so if you want to watch this, and I suggest you do, hop over to Freevee and check it out. You've been sufficiently warned.
This is a little dark for my taste. We have a bird getting smashed to death, a cat killed, and two elementary-aged girls killed. That doesn't mean I think it's a bad movie, or that I think it was a bad move for Wallen and screenwriter Bret Miller to go in that direction, it's more a personal taste thing. Going strictly objectively, Wallen and cinematographer Alex Gasparetto do a great job shooting this, I loved the way the scenes were framed, and how they filmed the dark scenes without sacrificing visibility. I also like Wallen going back to his theme of "some lives are worth more than others" which we've seen in his other films, and Angelina Danielle Cama is great in the central role as the young lady who just wants to be a human and has a desire to help others, while her foster father Sean Whalen sees her as a means to cover his gambling debts through the checks he gets from the state for being her foster parent; and Kaiti Wallen sees getting Julie a better life as more her own raison d'etre as she's dealing with burnout from her job. One issue the film runs into is we lose Julie's story towards the end, as we focus more on Kaiti Wallen's Rebecca and her working with local sheriff Harley Wallen to find out what's happening in Julie's foster home. Because it felt like the ancient vampire was a metaphor for say a pimp or other predator that would prey on a young lady in Julie's situation, I would have liked to have seen more of that interplay; or if we wanted more about Rebecca's challenges as a social worker, maybe introduced that more early on so it felt like we were following two stories instead of one. Overall though, I feel like Wallen and everyone else involved here achieved what they were going for, and if you're okay with it being darker, this is a solid film that's worth your time.
We now have four films directed by Harley Wallen on the site, so it was definitely time to get him his tag, but beyond that, I think you can see a progression where he's getting a better sense of how he wants to make a movie and how he can creatively work around the budgetary and logistical constraints that come with being an indie filmmaker. I preferred Ash and Bone to this one, but I think this was objectively a better movie. What's great was he cast Angelina Danielle Cama in Ash and Bone to be a spoiled rich kid whose penchant for selfish troublemaking almost gets her father and stepmother killed, and does get some innocent locals killed; but then he could cast her here as someone on the opposite end of the spectrum, a child of the foster care system who has endured a lot--more than we probably know--but still cares enough for others to want to protect and nurture them. I was a really big fan of Cama's performance here, she exuded a young Scarlett Johansson presence in the way she delivered her lines and interacted with her other cast mates. It'll be interesting to see what she does next, I see in the upcoming projects section of Wallen's IMDb page that he has a sequel to Ash and Bone on the horizon, which sounds really good.
After John Wick, if anyone didn't already know the rules surrounding killing animals in movies, they should now. I remember screenwriter Johnny Sullivan (Recoil--the Steve Austin one) said screenwriters know killing an animal is a huge deal in a film, not something to be done without understanding the gravity of it, and he used Wick as an example, having gotten wind of it before it was released. In this we first get a tiny bird that Whalen smashes to death with a shovel, saying he was putting it out of its misery, even though it seemed like it was tweeting along just fine. Then that poor kitty above gets fed to our vampire baddie. While we don't see it happen, we know it's happened, and knowing how adorable she is in the previous scene, it's hard to take. Finally, Julie's two younger foster sisters are killed by the vampire, which we also don't see. Again, it was all too dark for me, but I also know I'm more sensitive to that kind of thing. I think of Do or Die, where the cat eats the poisoned fish before our heroes do, tipping them off that something was amiss. Like this film, they give the kitty a credit, so we think "hey, she's all right, she was just playing her part." Maybe, but if we're all just playing a part, then should I not be moved by Cama's performance as Julie, since she's just playing a part too? Another famous example is Elves, which the case could be made is so ridiculous, the cat murder is just part of the ridiculousness. For me it's one thing that keeps it from being my all time favorite Christmas film, but I get too how Mitch from the Video Vacuum can look past it. Finally, on our most recent "Middle Aged Men Watch 90s Era Jim Belushi," Jon Cross from After Movie Diner and I watched Mr. Destiny, which has Belushi run over his dog while he was in the what if portion of the story, only to find out his dog was okay when he went back to his normal life. I was more okay with it, feeling like the dog never really died, but Jon made the point that in that alternate timeline the dog did die, which I had to agree with as being an issue, so even there, killing the dog was too much. I also think a one-off would've been more manageable, but killing a tiny bird, then a small cat, then two elementary-aged kids--one of whom runs into the woods because she thinks she hears her missing kitty, only to be killed--is too much darkness in one film for me to take.
Probably the most recognizable name in this for people who haven't seen many Harvey Wallen films is Sean Whalen, who plays the creepy and abusive foster dad. He turns in a really great performance here, but for me the issue was the scenes of him losing at poker took away from what we had going on between Julie's struggle as a foster child and Rebecca's struggle as a social worker. I think that was where the meat of the movie was, not Whalen's character, but I also get that having a Whalen in the film, you want to use him more. I would offer a counterpoint: his performance was strong enough here that he gives us what we need in fewer scenes. Or maybe another possibility if we needed more of him, was to give him more scenes with Cama and Kaiti Wallen, so we don't lose their story as much, but we also get the requisite Whalen screentime. The one thing I wouldn't want is the film to be longer to mitigate these issues. 90 minutes is right where this should be.
Finally, this takes place in Maine, even though it was shot in Michigan. They use the fictitious county of Oakland, which is a town in Maine, near Waterville, but isn't a county--unlike in Michigan where it's not only a country, but one of the biggest counties as part of the Detroit metro area. I get wanting to use a fictitious county, as I use fictitious towns and even states in my writing, though I don't know if they had used Kennebec County, the county Oakland is in in Maine, if anyone would've come complaining if they thought the story hit too close to home. (The other thing is, if the story is taking place in Maine, you can't use the generic "the county" to describe anything, because that's the nickname for the largest county by area, Aroostook County.) Anyway, all that to say, one thing I enjoy about Wallen's films is his use of Michigan as a character, and we lost that by setting the film in a fictitious version of Maine. It's not like there's something specifically Maine about the film either, just that you can't use ancient Vikings dropping things off in Michigan. Worse though, it felt like a Michigan version of Maine, especially with people's accents, kind of like that SNL sketch that was supposed to be a courtroom drama in Maine, but everyone had Louisiana accents. I'm not saying Wallen should never make a film that takes place anywhere outside of Michigan, I'm just saying his use of Michigan as a character was a strong point for me in his other films, and the fact that it came through even for someone like me who has never stepped foot in Michigan except for one time switching planes at Detroit Metro Airport, shows how powerful an element it is, and it's something that's lost when the film takes place somewhere else.
All right, with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can get this free with ads on Freevee here in the States. Depending on how dark you like to go in your films, this might work for you. It's a solidly made film, well-shot and well-acted, so if you're okay with how dark it is, this is worth your time.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11027288
And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.
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