CovenDirector: Mark BorchardtGenre: Horror Publisher: Northwestern Productions Released: 1997 MPAA Rating: Unrated Cast: Mark Borchardt, Tom Schimmels |
A Review by Jeremiah Kipp
12/18/2001
Well, surprise, surprise. Guess what movie I found in our friendly neighborhood snob store? None other than Mark Borshardt’s Coven.
If this title rings a bell, it’s the film within the film in that documentary, American Movie, about the perils and madness of amateur no-budget independent filmmaking. Wisconsin resident Mark Borshardt came off as a nerdy, ruthless, offbeat child in a thirty year old’s body desperate to make the great American horror movie. He wasn’t well spoken, or smart, or particularly friendly, but he was certainly persuasive and motivated.
Now, American Movie makes Mark look slightly ridiculous, as though he doesn’t know what he’s doing (even when he’s sober). He shoots the entire movie ass backwards, inattentive to continuity, lighting, or even sound (everything is dubbed afterwards while he cuts the movie on the old fashioned Steenbeck.) In a climactic scene when he shoves some poor bastard’s head through a cabinet, they keep smashing the poor actor’s head into the wood and it just won’t break.
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One thing you can say for Coven: it’s not as bad as American Movie might lead you to believe. The story is painfully slight and repetitive, but every now and then Mark comes up with a good image of hooded druid types surrounding our hero and dragging him through a river, or smashing up his car with hammers.
Mark not only wrote and directed this movie – he gave himself the lead role as alcoholic writer who joins a self-help group after a near fatal encounter with pills which bear an uncanny resemblance to prescription drugs. This is no ordinary ten step program, though, since Mark can’t go out for a walk in the woods without strange hooded figures who chase after him.
The forty minutes of screen time follow Mark’s “fantasies” and the group pouring out their hearts and souls about their nasty habits. The leader of the coven confesses that he once committed a murder (insert diabolical laughter here) and Mike begins to wonder if his own life might be on the line.
American Movie
It’s doubtful the casual movie goer will want to go out of their way to rent Coven, but if you enjoyed American Movie it might be fun for a lark.
There’s Mark’s big hearted buddy, Mike Schenck, among the coven, and he sounds exactly the same as he does in the documentary, rambling on and on about hits of acid. In one particularly amusing self-help anecdote, Mike relays continually getting into trouble going into work drunk, so one day he showed up on two hits of acid just to spite them.
All in all, it’s better than some of the first year student films I saw at NYU. At least he’s got a good, driving score (performed on the guitar by one of Mark’s buddies, no doubt) and some creepy long shots of back roads and clawlike tree branches stretching into an empty sky. Yeah, if Mark had a little more training, he might even be good.
Most of the time, Mark keeps the camera locked down on the actors while they talk (and the B-movie dialogue is entirely lacking in nuance or subtext.) The sound isn’t great and he has frequent exposure problems (which don’t cut together especially well – a bright, overexposed image followed by a dark, underlit one,)
To be honest, I might not have been so forgiving of the film’s flaws if I hadn’t seen Mark documented struggle to make the damned movie as seen in American Movie. For kicks, watch the movie and see if you can tell where old Mark was “influenced” by George Romero and Tobe Hooper. Though it ain’t no Texas Chainsaw Massacre by any stretch of the imagination, I give Mark two stars for trying. Ed Wood, Jr. is smiling somewhere.
© Copyright ToxicUniverse.com 12/18/2001
