Where the Devil Roams

dirs: Toby Poser, John Adams and Zelda Adams

2023

I love that the Adams family exists. I’m not talking about the other one, with two Ds in their name, those ones who are creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and ooky.

I mean the real life family of John Adams and Toby Poser, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu, who make movies together, on the virtual smell of a digital oily rag ie. with no money.

I don’t know how they fund their movies, I don’t know how they paid to rent a Model T Ford or to pay crew, extras etc in anything other than hugs and sandwiches. And I kinda wish someone would hand them a ridiculous budget so they could blow it all on trips to the Riviera and inflatable furniture (is that what rich people buy?)

But I can’t see that big budgets would compel them in inventive and creative ways to create the kinds of flicks they make. I saw and loved Hellbender from a couple of years ago, and while I didn’t get into this flick quite as much, it still has a similar anarchic energy of a movie that doesn’t follow a well-trodden path.

That being said, I couldn’t help but be reminded of probably the only Rob Zombie flick I’ve ever liked, being The Devil’s Rejects. That’s to my shame, not the Adams’.

Set during the Great Depression, Maggie (Toby Poser), Seven (John Adams) and Eve (Zelda Adams) travel around with carnie folk and pretty much just murder people. Maggie I think does most of the murdering, Eve takes photos, and Seven looks away because he can’t stand the sight of blood, having seen way too much during the Great War to ever be a normal person again.

And that’s pretty much it. Visually the flick has a whole bunch of scenes of startling quality and composition, just because they’re so different from shots you see in any other flick, perhaps deliberately. Compared to their earlier flick this is much gorier, much more macabre. But there’s also a fairly menacing element to it, and I put it down to both the awkward phrasing of much of the dialogue, deliberately striving to make it sound like words that could have dropped from the mouths of John Steinbeck’s characters, and the almost otherworldly, almost Amish sensibility of working in such a wood paneled period setting.

I generally love carnie folk, or stuff with carnie folk, or about carnie folk, and this is no different. This is no Carnival of Souls or Freaks, but the lovely people are ones who I’m on the side of automatically because that’s just how it is – I didn’t make the rules that govern my life, but I do live by them. I will always emotionally side with the marginalised, the ostracised and those polite society deems to be undesirables, and I always will.

That many of their victims, at first, are wealthy scum trying to fuck over the carnival is not lost on me, and very much appreciated. If you want me to side with a travelling family of serial killers, it helps if you make the antagonists be rich awful fucks. Eat the rich, I say, though this ain’t a family of cannibals.

Among their number in the travelling show is a chap called Mr Tipps (Sam Rodd), whose cheap parlor trick is snipping off his finger tips to the delight and disgust of the audience. Only later do we watch him reattach them, with the explanation of how he does it.

It’s his terrifying voice, you see. I can still hear it now, days later. I will probably hear it in my nightmares for years to come. I don’t know how he makes his voice so unsettling. I’m not even sure why. But I’m still afraid, and he’s not even the craziest person in the flick.

The flick is stop-start, episodic, and a bit rough around the edges, but that doesn’t hurt the flick at all. Once they’ve run out of legitimate targets for their excesses, in order to prove her love for her Seven, and to get revenge for what he suffered in the war, Maggie decides to racially profile a farmer and murderise his Kaiser-loving arse.

Problem is, he’s not German, he’s Norwegian.

Now, truth be told, many Americans couldn’t rightly tell you what the difference is, but the veneer that the murderous family is somehow righteous in what they’re doing in this place and time falls by the wayside, and someone else springs up to dismember Maggie and Seven, leaving them in quite a sorry state.

This means the family have to up their game, or at least Eve has to find her new solution to an ongoing problem, which is, how do you keep stolen limbs fresh and viable?

Well, with a little help from the devil, of course.

I love that they make the films they want to make. I sometimes wish they could make the kinds of flicks other studios would pick up and give a theatrical release to as well, but you can’t do DIY when you’re worried what a Weinstein-type thinks about your movie. Or having to cater to the likes of Neon, Blumhouse or *shudder* A24.

Let them keep making their movies. Creepy, funny, tangible horror flicks with themes and resonance and arch performances, and a visceral grip on what makes something either dreadful or dread filled. Practical effects and excellent natural light photography, and even drone camera footage done so well they should be teaching filmmaking courses at NYU.

And great music. They make they’re own grindy early Breeders era sounding music as well. This family is way too talented.

Where the Devil Roams isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea with decaying fingers poking out over the brim, but those who know, know.

7 times I also know enough not to ever cross them either out of 10

--
“When the road is mean, the blood will thicken, the Devil’s pulse begins to quicken, while the body rots to dust and bones, there’s a tear in the heart where the Devil roams.” – wise, baffling words - Where the Devil Roams