During the summer, Newport's Valley might be a tourist hotspot, but off season it's as sleepy as any other rural American small town - but it's off season when Bart (Cary Hite) has taken over the local hotel, and the business is booming enough ... for Bart to tell his maid Roz (Sienna Hubert-Ross) to get a part time job as there just isn't enough work for her. Sure, there are some tourists there, like Aida (Alexis Safoyan) and her gang of ill-equipped hikers (Jay Voishnis, Alyssa Batsakis, Sassan Saffari, Angela Ann Palermo) or Kenzie (Victoria Mirrer), a woman seeking closure but unwilling to tell anyone what for. Anyways, there's something wrong about Newport's Valley, as Roz, trying to find a job, is pushed down a cave, and it's sheer luck rather than anything else that she finds her way out, All of Aida's friends are killed by someone or something unknown, and out of the blue Kenzie finds herself on the run from some creature, later to be revealed as local urban legend the Wrexsoul (Rachel Pizzolato). Fortunately, a trio of local conspiracy theorists (Adam Weppler, Phil Duran, Sean T. Ward) has called in cryptid hunter Munroe (Damian Maffei) to hunt down and kill the creature, but on one hand that's not as easy as it sounds, on the other it seems Gregory Newport (Jamie Dufault), descendant of the town's founder, and his wife (Melody Kay) as well as others who have been living here for generations don't only know about the creature but actually feed the occasional tourist to it to keep it appeased - and frankly, our heroes are as good a sacrifice as anyone else ...

A nice blend of folk horror and creature feature with some soap opera motives thrown in, Round the Decay might seem a bit overwhelming at first due to its sheer plethora of characters - but actually all these characters are well fleshed out and hardly anybody's relegated to mere cannonfodder status, while several character arcs are carried by or even carry the overall narrative arc. And of course, a very able cast helps with keeping things relatable. On top of that, the film has a really well-conceived, practically achiefed creature at its center, one it wisely only shows sparingly before the third act - and the third act's really explosive, featuring carnage aplenty and providing the audienc with a really cool pay-off, only helping to make this one a pretty entertaining genre piece.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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