The Bell Keeper is not terribly bad for a horror flick co-executive produced by and co-starring Randy Couture (it certainly beats the shit out of Expend4bles). On the other hand, it’s not terribly original either, nor as clever as it fancies itself to be, and it would have behooved it to be a little less self-aware and a little more self-conscious.
Five young adults in a motorhome (at one point referred to as “the last Winnebago on the left,” even though it is the only Winnebago on any direction) set out to make a documentary about “Urban legends. Rumored hauntings across America.” Because that hasn’t been done to death, both in real life and in the movies (and by ‘real life’ I mean that real people also go on “creepy-ass ghost hunt[s],” not that ghosts are real).
Self-designated driver Liam (Reid Miller) is the Shaggy of this cut-rate Scooby Doo gang. He’s “spooked” because, although “I guess we’re all stoners,” he believes that he qualifies as “the principal stoner of the cast, and we all know how well that character fares in these stories.” But do we really, though?
I think Liam is getting his tropes mixed-up. We all know that the Black Dude Dies First, but if there were such a thing as a Red Shirt stoner, it would most likely be just a coincidence (for instance, if the stoner happens to belong to the African American persuasion) — but who knows; maybe Liam is merely trying to spare Gabe’s feelings, since Gabe (Capri-Antoine Vaillancourt) is after all the token black(ish) character.
Anyway, Liam, his brother Matthew (Mike Manning), Matthew’s girlfriend Holly (Cathy Marks), Gabe, and Gabe’s girl Megan (Alexis B. Santiago) head out to Bell Lake, a campsite where “there’s a bell … which is where the lake gets its name. Some blogs, they write that the bell is cursed along with all of those that ring it.” And, as it turns out, all of those who hear it toll (yet no one makes a reference to Donne or Hemingway, perhaps because neither ever wrote a scary movie. Speaking of which, do our heroes meet a Creepy Gas-Station Attendant when they stop to fill up the tank? Is blood red?).
When the bell is rung at midnight, it summons Hank (Couture), a farmhand from 1876, who then goes Jason on the campers. There’s more to it than that, but it’s hardly worth elaborating on because the name of the game is ‘what you see is what you get,’ and sometimes you can see it before you even get it.
The filmmakers do their best to prevent plotholes, though some loose ends do remain untied (look no further than the alleged “church bell” that’s little more than a tin toy compared to, say, the one in Andrei Rublev. Also, how exactly did Hank get coliflower ears?); sadly, their best is not good enough to avoid a few mild contrivances. Then again, to say of a horror film that is only slightly contrived is almost a compliment in this graceless day and age.
All things considered, this is B-grade stuff through and through, both for better and for worse. For example, the special/visual effects range from passable (make-up) to laughable (CGI), but at least the low budget (nothing says ‘shoestring’ quite like shooting in the woods) doesn’t allow for too much of either.
Moreover, the script can actually be funny, in an endearingly dorky sort of way, whenener it isn’t trying too hard (or not hard enough, seeing as how the whole documentary angle is quickly phased out once it has achieved its goal of getting the bell rung) to be meta. Case in point, “why did the demon get arrested?” The answer is profoundly silly, but I laughed nevertheless.