Saint Martyrs of the Damned | Review

Main character is desperate for answers, while film seems desperate for a palpable story.

With a precise Quebecois market in mind, Saints-Martyrs-des-Damnés is largely a film that has a fascination for worn out child’s dolls, pictures frames of dead people, token retards and other birth defects. Coming across with a recognizable Scooby Doo adventure flair, simply put, Robin Aubert’s directorial debut is a regurgitation of recent devices collected from dumbed-down Hollywood-styled occult flicks and should rake in a sizeable amount of the province’s box-office dollars.

Inspired by the tabloid world of alien abductions and freaks of nature, an unwanted presence in a very eerie town comes in the shape of a pint-sized journalist, who unbeknownst to him has a special connection to this off the map location. Quite a bit of humor gets inserted into this narrative, the potential laughs come when a perfectly sane principle character (François Chénier) finds himself among a town full of zany characters holding up invisible “stay out” signs, which has little effect on the ranks of a tabloid journalist.

Director Robin Aubert doesn’t have much to work with in terms of an original storyline, but he does manage to use interesting angle set-ups, perfect décor and excellent locations – the sort that doesn’t require any fake set constructions. Tinted to give the appearance of a disserted, and yet creepy appeal even in broad daylight, the film isn’t dreadful to look at in its HD splendor, but is hard to get through especially when the ingenious recycled twist of the film gets revealed.

For a film that sees the protagonist in desperate search of his identity – the film overall film itself is in need of one. If Saints-Martyrs-des-Damnés wasn’t short on interesting subplots then this could have been a film that would have definitely past the province’s borders in terms of reach. Complete lack of vision and originality, this is perhaps not the best of manners in which to woo the already entrenched fans of the genre.

Rating 1 stars