The Attendant [DVD]

Movie starts off pretty well given the low budget of the film. Looks like it was filmed by some college students. After the first 25-30 minutes the movie starts getting really dull! The friends sit around a campfire telling about the scariest things that have ever happened to them. One of the girls starts rambling on about how some guy had broke into her apartment and tried to rape her. She says how she started to tell the guy to do it to her good, she said this freaked the guy out and he tried to run off. So then she runs after him naked and screaming at him don't you want me, you sick bleep! The bad language really flies while she is rambling on with this absurd story. Although there are some OK creepy scenes, the death scenes are totally confusing and wierd! Not a good movie in my opinion!

Well, it's not often that having a fast one pulled on you makes for good entertainment. The box art for The Attendant plainly depicts a crazy-eyed man holding a knife to a woman's throat. The box description blurbs that "A mysterious gas station attendant systematically murders a group of camping teenagers who uncover his dark and deadly secret." Sounds standard, but guess what. That is not the plot to this movie!

One expects nothing more than a sleazy slasher film going into The Attendant. It's expected not simply because that was how the film was promoted, but that's how it sets itself up to be; three couples going camping in isolated woods despite fearful warnings by local residents, a creepy reclusive gas attendant, who by every bit of information thus far is implicated as a killer, and a backstory depicting the exact situations that we are expecting to happen again. Ok, everything's lined up, so let's knock `em down and get this over with. Oh, but wait... about half way through you learn that you've been misled.

I'm not sure if the distributors of this movie watched more than five minutes of it, because everything that it turns out to be is nothing like what it is described as. First off, and stop here if you would rather see for yourself and enjoy the surprise, the attendant is not called the attendant because he runs a small gas station. He is the attendant of a malicious and ancient force that resides in the woods. There are old Indian legends of dark and bloody grounds that feed on the blood of the living, where the spirits of the dead are forced to reside and assist the evil force in obtaining more victims.

The surprise twist is quite original and much is left to the imagination of the viewer as to how everything exists and how it works. The full revelation is not until the end of the movie and it is abrupt. You are left having to think about what you just saw in order to put the pieces together. The nature of the attendant is not really explained, but simply an interpretation of it. What you don't see and what you are not told are sometimes the best parts of any story.

One thing is clear though, if you go into the woods, you die. The characters cannot escape that fact and the carnage that ensues, while not very gory, still had me squirming due to its stark execution. No one dies pretty, and because of the likeability of the characters you don't want them to. Death in the film is metaphoric and depicted as self-fulfilling destruction. A woman who wants a baby follows the spirit of a little girl unto her own demise. A man afraid of water is forced to drown himself. Each death is the conclusion of what the characters have allowed themselves to come to. They did not heed the warnings of entering the woods, but as we all do, they haven't heeded the warnings in their own hearts about the course of their lives either.

The Attendant is a small movie, with fewer characters than you can count on your fingers, but the actors all do a splendid job. The effects are simple yet effective. The direction and pace of the film is brisk, even though there is so much setup until the final climatic events. The only complaints are technical ones. The film was shot on digital video and most scenes are night shots, which doesn't always look good on digital. Extras are sparse, with only a short making-of and a trailer. The DVD transfer is fine but accentuates the cheaply way the film was shot. Keeping things in perspective, these shortcomings are easily overlooked if you allow yourself to enjoy the film for what it is. You just might be surprised.