Burl reviews The Hole! (2009)

Ha ha and holey holes, it’s Burl, with one of the newer Joe Dante pictures to review for you today! With the Gremlins-fuelled salad days of his career behind him by the early days of the twenty-first century, Dante was pulled back to the lower budgets of his early years; but hand-in-glove with that regression came a return to the more horror-oriented pictures he used to do, like Piranha and The Howling! Today’s review is of The Hole, which is a horror-fantasy with a youthful dimension, and of all Dante’s previous works it most strongly recalls his episode in Twilight Zone: The Movie!

The story is fairly simple: a single mom with two kids - one an unusually angsty male teen, the other a precocious younger brother - move into a new house in a small town, and, after they meet the pretty girl next door, she and the two brothers discover a heavily padlocked trapdoor in the basement floor! Of course they open it up to find a seemingly infinite void within! My first worry would be that my house was going to collapse into this cavern, but this apparently doesn’t cross their minds - all they do is continue to bicker and be rude to their mother!

But of course spooky things begin to happen, and it’s hard to say whether they’re borrowed more from Poltergeist or The Gate! Ha ha, I’m not accusing the picture of plagiarism, but there are a few remarkable similarities, namely the clown doll of which the younger sibling is afraid, and which comes to life and tries to strangle him, just as happens to the little brother in the Tobe Hooper picture! From The Gate we get material that is less specific, but more important: a back story of familial tragedy, parents who go away for the weekend, and a general horror-meets-After School Special sort of atmosphere!

Luckily this is a Joe Dante picture, and so we also get a cameo appearance from Dick Miller, who plays a pizza man! Ha ha, it’s a completely wordless part, measurable in single-digit seconds, and is perhaps the most desultory role of Miller’s sixty-year career! But we’re lucky he’s in it at all - the movie was shot mostly in Vancouver, with only a week or so of pick-ups in Los Angeles, which is where they shoehorned Miller in! Bruce Dern from The King of Marvin Gardens also shows up, playing a lightbulb-loving (or, more properly, a darkness-fearing) old crank, and his appearance is in a way even more desultory than Miller’s, seeing as how he’s so much more a plot device than he is a character!

There are some spooky sequences though, and Dante, grizzled Hollywood veteran that he is, keeps a sure hand on the tiller! The early bits with the discovery of the hole and the mystery of what it’s all about are probably the best, and the climax, which features some clever moments, is what most specifically reminds us of Dante’s segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie; but it also recalls the snake-man sequence from Dreamscape, which I guess is yet another picture this one borrows from!

The borrowings are more charming than they are anything else, and I don’t hold them against either Dante or his movie! I do wish the older brother’s angst could have been communicated without him being so unpleasant all the time, and I could have done without some of the 3D trappings that are nearly at the Jaws 3D level of flagrancy, but on the whole I thought the picture was reasonably effective, decently efficient 80s throwback! Ha ha, plus Miller’s in there, and also I guess I’m just a devotee of holes! So I’ll give The Hole two pizza deliveries!