Psycho's Movie Reviews #200: The Hole (2009)

The Hole is a 2009 American 3D dark fantasy horror film directed by Joe Dante and starring Chris Massoglia, Haley Bennett, Nathan Gamble, Bruce Dern, and Teri Polo. The film follows Dane and Lucas Thompson, two brothers who move into their new house in Bensenville with their single mother, Susan. While settling in their new home, Dane and Lucas, along with their new neighbour, Julie Campbell, discover a trap door in the basement, leading to a bottomless pit and, upon opening it, accidentally unleash a supernatural force that manifests itself into any fear of the person who looks into the titular hole.

Plot

Seventeen-year-old Dane Thompson, his 10-year-old brother, Lucas, and their mother, Susan, move from Brooklyn to the quiet town of Bensenville where Dane and Lucas befriend their next door neighbour, Julie Campbell. While exploring their new home, Dane and Lucas discover a trapdoor with several locks along each side in the basement. Opening the trapdoor reveals a hole which appears to be bottomless.

Over the next few days, each child experiences strange events. Lucas, having a fear of clowns, discovers a jester puppet on his bed, as well as other locations, as if it is following him. Julie begins to see an injured girl who bleeds from her eyes. Dane starts to see shadowy figures of a large man. Eventually, all three witness the injured girl together at the boys' home where they follow her to the basement and watch as she crawls into the hole.

Julie suggests they seek help from the previous owner of the house, Creepy Carl, who now lives in an abandoned glove factory surrounded by hundreds of lights and lamps. When the kids tell him that they have opened the hole, he berates them for releasing the evil inside stating that it will come for them and kill Dane. Later that night, Carl is seen scribbling in a sketchbook, almost blacking out entire pages. Carl screams, "I'm not done yet!" as the light bulbs around him pop.

The sketchbook turns out to belong to Dane, who returns to the factory to retrieve it. He finds his sketchbook in the darkness; Creepy Carl is gone. Julie decides to get the group relaxed and invites them to swim in her pool. While under the water, Dane sees a shadowy figure of a giant man standing above. Once out of the pool, he notices a trail of muddy footprints which he and Julie follow, leaving Lucas alone in the pool. They hear Julie's pet dog, Charlie, barking and return to see Lucas drowning. Lucas tells them that the jester puppet had pulled him under.

Later that night, while Lucas is asleep, Dane sees a hand-shaped bruise on Lucas's leg. He discovers that it is identical to a hand that Creepy Carl had drawn in the sketchbook. As he flips through the sketchbook, he realizes that each page is a puzzle piece. While working on the puzzle, Dane hears someone whistling. When he walks into the kitchen, he sees an envelope addressed to him from the New Jersey State Penitentiary. A note inside reads 'HELLO BOY'. He rushes upstairs to Lucas and tells him that someone is in the house. While Dane investigates, Lucas meets a police officer standing at the bottom of the stairs. The officer shows Lucas a picture of two little girls and asks if he has seen one of them and points to the girl whom Julie first encountered. The police officer leaves the picture with Lucas and turns to leave revealing the back of his head is missing. Lucas fetches Dane and the pair watch the cop return to the basement and climb into the hole.

Next door, the girl then appears in Julie's room. Julie climbs out of her window and meets the boys where she reveals to Dane that she and her best friend, Annie Smith, were playing on the tracks of an old roller coaster which resulted in an accident where Annie fell to her death. In an attempt to help Julie, a police officer also ended up falling to his death. She decides to return to the amusement park where the accident occurred; Dane goes after her, leaving Lucas on his own.

Julie finds her friend sitting on the same spot from which she fell. After Julie helps Annie understand that she had tried to save her, Annie disappears and is pleased that Julie is no longer scared. Meanwhile, Lucas hears Dane calling him to the basement. Confused, he follows the voice to discover the jester puppet mimicking Dane's voice. The puppet attacks Lucas, but is outwitted and eventually destroyed. Dane and Julie return and Lucas announces that he is no longer afraid of clowns. Dane then tells them of a theory that once you look into the hole, it somehow knows you and creates whatever you are afraid of. When asked what he is afraid of, Dane replies that he is not afraid of anything.

Julie then invites Dane and Lucas to stay at her place for the night. As Lucas is gathering his things, Dane shows Julie the puzzle he had been working on. They solve the puzzle together and see a boy being grabbed by a giant man. Dane rushes upstairs to find that Lucas is gone. Dane finally reveals that he is afraid of his father, who had abused the entire family and is now in prison. Realizing that his father has taken Lucas into the hole, Dane jumps into the hole as well.

Dane finds Lucas hiding in the closet of a twisted version of their old home. Their father, who has become a giant, discovers them and starts to break through the door. They turn around and discover the shelving seems to be a ladder. Dane tells Lucas to start climbing. Dane starts to follow, until his father drags him back down. As Dane fights him off, the giant father slowly returns to his actual size as Dane starts to confront his fear, seeing him for what he really is. Their surroundings begin to crumble and the floor falls away leaving Dane and his father trapped on an island under a ceiling fan. Having taken his father's belt, Dane pulls himself onto the fan and gives the crumbling floor one final blow with the belt buckle causing the floor to break apart and the father to fall.

Dane emerges from the hole where Julie and Lucas are waiting. They close the hole, just as their mother comes down to the basement. She sees the trapdoor and opens it, revealing a shallow crawl space below. As the group heads upstairs, Lucas asks his mom if she is afraid of anything. She replies that she was afraid of a monster under her bed when she was a little girl. Lucas says, "Uh oh," as the trapdoor blows open again revealing the darkness has returned.

In the post-credits, the jester puppet is shown winking his left eye.

Production

The film began shooting in 3D on December 5, 2008, in Vancouver, Canada.

Release/Reception/Box Office

The Hole had its world premiere at the 66th Venice International Film Festival on September 11, 2009. It was screened at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival the following day, and later at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

The film was first released theatrically in Thailand on May 5, 2010. It had its United States debut screening at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco on October 7, 2011. The Hole was released in 3D in select theatres in Los Angeles and Atlanta on September 28, 2012, and was made available on DVD, Blu-ray, and video on demand (VOD) on October 2, 2012.

The film garnered positive reviews from critics. Film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 81% of critics gave the film a positive review, based on 36 reviews, with a rating average of 6.4 out of 10. The site's consensus reads, "A welcome throwback to the suburban teen thrillers of the 1980s, The Hole is a scary, enjoyable return to form for director Joe Dante."

Budget $12 million

Box office $10.5 million

My Review

Gremlins remains one of my favourite films from childhood, and it is thanks to Joe Dante who helmed the films with enough to keep it frightening, yet kid friendly and family oriented at the same time. It's been a long while since I've missed Small Soldiers on the big screen, that he now returns with The Hole, yet dabbling with a similar treatment of making it quite the entertaining romp for both young and old to sit through.

A pity about the 3D version though, as I opted to watch this in 2D, and clearly because of the 3D gimmick, there were a few needless scenes stuck in, like having a kid throw a baseball toward the screen while lying on his back on his bed. On the whole there weren't too many deliberate 3D shots designed for the film, though I thought that the special effects put into it were spiffy enough, especially since there was a good mix of traditional stop motion efforts deliberate done in a cheesy manner, and those of the modern money shots toward the end.

As it's family oriented, this film like the rest of what Dante did thus far, has family being in the centre of all things that trip up in the dark, and we get three stories put into one, by virtue of each character having to deal with their fears come alive. Written by Mark L. Smith (Vacancy), the narrative keeps you guessing exactly what the reason is behind the threats are as faced by each child/teenage lead in the Thompson brothers Dane (Chris Massoglia) and Lucas (Nathan Gamble), and their neighbour Julie (Haley Bennett) when they look down the cursed hole, found in the new home of the Thompsons.

The idea is pretty cool in itself, because what could spook you more than what's truly your greatest fear? However that itself served up a mixed bag of scares, because the scares here are customized to the character's. For instance, Lucas has to deal with something straight out of Child's Play, although this little thingamajig had a small scene as a stinger after the end credits (well, if you have to know, it's only a wink, so you didn't miss much if you failed to stay behind). For Julie, it has to deal with a guilt from the past that manifest itself as something spiritual, and to face one's guilt is something that takes up her story arc.

For Dane's however, it was kept under wraps until the last, which provided for a fitting finale with all the bells and whistles thrown in, dealing with how the magnitude of one's problems when young seem to shrink in size as we grow older, possibly because we may either have outgrown it, or that being older we have a lot more other concerns to deal, in his case, the growing into a surrogate paternal role over the care of his younger brother, in a single parent family.

Still, despite being a horror/thriller, this is still something that will find a broad appeal, being somewhat simple in its stories, but nothing less than effective and of course for those catching it in 3D, yet another film to provide you that fixation with putting on the glasses. I'm not quite sure if a sequel would be made given the way it ended with a plot thread so glaringly hanging out, but we know how Gremlins 2 went.

One can see that the makers of this movie grew up with old horror films, the ones that were about you, not some cliché annoying teen that just screamed for death or some deranged woman scared of everything. They were mostly about facing your fear, rather than succumb to its implacability.

The Hole is like that. It is a movie about two brothers, one a kid, the other barely a teen. Their single mom moves them to a new town, a new house, and they discover this weird hole in their basement, through which all their fears take shape and come forth. Who will win in the end? Courage or fear?

Now, the movie can be considered a horror, but really is mostly not scary. The small child, the teen boy and his female counterpart next door are normal people. No high school dramas, no crazy parties that lead to unsanctioned fornication and subsequent killing spree (man, the people making those films have some repressed feelings), no screaming and running aimlessly. They are just exploring kids, trying to understand and stay ahead of the inexplicable.

In that sense the film is similar to Under the Bed, also a film about two brothers fighting their fear and also one that shows clear love for the genre, in the classical sense. They both feel like 80's movies, especially the special effects (*cough*cough*), but that is a good thing for me.

Bottom line: if you (secretly) miss Poltergeist and the original Nightmare on Elm Street, you will love this movie. Being a rather non violent film, you could even watch it with your young ones.

The director is Joe Dante, who also directed gems like The Howling, Gremlins and a few episodes of Eerie, Indiana. If I think about it, the children in the film remind me of that show a lot. Bruce Dern plays a small role and Dick Miller, veteran horror actor that played in many of Dante's films, makes a cameo appearance as the pizza delivery man.

Hail the return of Joe Dante. He never makes classic movies, but he does make favourites. I love Small Soldiers and Gremlins. Dante has a rather cruel sense of humour, which makes him perfect for directing kids movies. All kids are a little weird, but not enough films play up to this. I grew up with Goosebump books, Are You Afraid of the Dark on TV, and Tim Burton movies. Kids like to be scared, and here is a horror I would gladly sit any child in front of. It's quite sweet how outdated Dante and the writer seem to be. Even the insult "dickhead" is still muttered in this universe. Once the hole is discovered it's pretty much non-stop. A lot of it creeped me out, with clown puppets and little girls bleeding. Dante uses a mixture of effects to his advantage, before going all out CGI for the inevitable climax. The Hole is a film for kids that likes scary stories and monsters, without traumatizing them. 7.3/10