Starring: Zachary Knighton, Melora Walters, Pat Healy, Stan Shaw, Bill Sage, Devin Druid

Director: Aaron B. Koontz
Released: 2020

Mood: If you’re full of self-loathing and don’t believe you deserve to watch good movies so you only put on really bad ones.

The absolute NERVE of The Pale Door to open with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Haunted Palace.

Don’t fall for it. Don’t believe that this movie derives any themes or quality from Poe. The Pale Door has about as much in common with Poe as I have with Kate Moss.

I don’t know what’s more annoying to me right now – that my husband convinced me to pay $5 to rent it on YouTube last night instead of another movie on my watch list, or that I have to keep thinking about it today in order to write a review.

The Pale Door starts out with a dark and stormy night surrounding a large Southern home with a white picket fence. A young boy is afraid, and his older brother comforts him. But then a posse arrives and kills their parents, and the boys escape with freedman Lester (Stan Shaw).

Fast forward to present time, also latte 1800s. Clumsy teenage Jake (Devin Druid) is sweeping up a saloon, and bumps a customer who starts to rough him up. In movie-perfect timing, his big brother swoops in for the rescue again (Zachary Knighton as Duncan)!

Duncan is the leader of the Dalton Gang, which later in real life became the Wild Bunch aka the Dalton-Doolin Gang, so it seems the boys are supposed to be Daltons. Even though there wasn’t a Jake or Duncan Dalton, so I’m not sure why the writers chose to do fake Daltons instead of either real Daltons or just a fake outlaw posse.

Anyway, the gang is passing through town while planning their next heist, and their first scenes together are entertaining. At that point I couldn’t figure out why The Pale Door has such low ratings, it was giving me major American Outlaws vibes.

But then they attempt a train robbery, and instead of a safe they find only a trunk containing a manacled young woman who is not the least bit sweaty or upset about being chained up in a trunk. Duncan is shot by a female Pinkterton as they stand around in a clearing pondering this girl instead of escaping like any skilled outlaw gang would do.

From then on, pretty much nothing makes sense for either plot or character story purposes.

The prisoner (Natasha Bassett as Pearl) says her town is nearby, even though the train had no stops in the area. They go to the town, and the only inhabitants are the ladies of a brothel. Of course, they go inside and fall for the many temptations. But then the beautiful women turn into hideous witches. They have oily, blackened skin from being burned at stake, long noses because apparently all witches have a huge schnoz, and they run on all fours because… I don’t even know who came up with this crap.

It’s further downhill from there.

The Pale Door is co-written, directed, and produced by Aaron B. Koontz, cousin to bestselling suspense author Dean Koontz. It’s also co-written by Keith Lansdale AND executive produced by his multi-Bram-Stoker-Award-winning brother, Joe R. Lansdale. There’s quite a bit of potential within that group.

And maybe that’s what went wrong. Maybe there were too many cooks at this stake. The movie definitely feels like a bunch of guys were like, “what would look really f*cking creepy/scary/cool on screen?” and threw it all in a cauldron, turned the flames up high, and expected magic to happen.

You know I love a bullet list, so here’s a quick list of everything I personally felt was awful about this movie:

• Gunfighters vs. witches should have been AWESOME, but there was no substance, just a bunch of action/gore slapped on top of distractingly useless emotional backstory
• The outlaws keep shooting the witches and more keep coming, but we never learn if the bullets killed them and there were just a LOT of f*cking witches in this town, or if the bullets weren’t actually killing the witches
• The smartest character, Wylie, falls apart and becomes useless in the fray, which is where a strategic character should have shone
• Melora Walters as Maria is somehow at once too much and not enough to be a strong, memorable cinematic witch
• The gang seems refreshingly diverse at first, but features an Indigenous man called “Chief” (James Whitecloud), who has no lines and dies early, and also Lester’s ‘kindly Black man’ trope whose life’s mission is to care for two white boys
• Pearl comes off as modern and full of herself; it’s a dead give away that she’s up to something, and her entire performance is one note
• Dodd’s character’s 180 doesn’t make a lick of sense during his forced dialogue at the end
• On that note, there are WAY too many long “here’s my expository monologue” bits while they’re surrounded by witches
• I’m still not over the use of Poe in the opening credits

There are a few scenes that work well, like Wylie (Pat Healy in a great overall performance) being hypnotized to eat glass and gouge out his own eyes. I had to look away, it was really unsettling.

And I did enjoy a few of the smaller performances in The Pale Door, too. James Landry Hébert is a scene-stealer as Cotton Mather of Salem witch trial infamy. Tina Parker as Brenda is kind of wasted in her short scenes; she seems like she would have created a way more interesting dynamic when they were all surrounded in that church.

I’m not even mad at Devin Druid for his character’s part in the disappointing, melodramatic ending. I know what he’s capable of (see 13 Reasons Why), but the dialogue in the last half of The Pale Door is just utter crap.

The final result of this hot mess that isn’t going to win any more fans to Westerns. I WILL be getting my $5 back.