The Hole Blu-ray Review
Didn't You Used to Be Called the Hellmouth?
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, October 2, 2012
Joe Dante's
The Hole played the New York Film Festival two years ago in October 2010, by
which point it had already opened in Europe and the Far East.
Avatar had burst the 3D floodgates
earlier that year, and it's hard to imagine that some enterprising studio executive didn't pick up a
film that was cheap (though it doesn't look it), completed and, most importantly, didn't require a
conversion, because
The Hole was natively filmed in 3D. After the drubbing handed to shoddy
post-production 3D transformations like the one performed by Warner on
Clash of the Titans,
acquiring
The Hole and allocating a modest promotional budget should have been a no-brainer.
But it was not to be, and over the next two years, the film continued to open in additional
overseas markets. Only now is it receiving a limited U.S. theatrical release. What's more, if you
want to see it in 3D, you'll have to find it in theaters, because the studio that finally acquired the
U.S. rights, Big Air Studios, doesn't yet publish 3D Blu-rays. Home 3D remains enough of a
niche market that new entrants in the Blu-ray market have enough on their hands managing the
hi-def format without the added challenge and investment of 3D.
Dante is talented enough as a filmmaker to ensure that
The Hole remains a superior entertainment
even in a 2D presentation. A lesser director might have been defeated by the thudding
derivativeness of Mark L. Smith's (
Vacancy) script, but Dante seems almost to relish the
challenge. He has always been a genre buff, from his big splash with the classic but unique
werewolf movie
The Howling, to his fond parody of Sixties sci-fi in
Innerspace, to his
increasingly twisted renditions of alien invasion stories with the
Gremlins films and
Toy Soldiers.
The Hole is Dante's variation of that hoary classic that seems to get dusted off at least once a year
(the latest is the upcoming
Sinister): Don't open that old box (or trunk, door, cabinet, etc.) in the
basement (or attic, crawl space, cubby hole, garden shed, or what have you), because something
bad will emerge.
Meet the Thompson family. Mom Susan (Teri Polo), seventeen-year-old elder son Dane (Chris
Massoglia) and ten-year-old younger son Lucas (Nathan Gamble) have just relocated to the small
town of Bensonville, where nothing much ever happens, or so it seems. The family started in
Brooklyn, but they've moved to a long list of towns since then, apparently always in a hurry and
leaving Dane thoroughly disgruntled with his new surroundings. And what about
Mr.
Thompson? No one wants to discuss him. Exposition 101 says there's a story being saved for
later.
The only thing in Bensonville that interests Dane is his comely next door neighbor, Julie (Haley
Bennett), who has many equally good-looking friends and an ex-boyfriend. But Dane is too shy
to talk to her, until Lucas wanders over and introduces himself, mostly to annoy his older brother.
It's Julie who tells them about "Crazy Carl" (Bruce Dern), the house's former inhabitant and,
presumably, the one who put all the locks on the trap door in the basement.
Lucas and Dane found the trap door after they moved in. It's big, and it's secured by multiple
heavy padlocks of a special construction that can't be snapped with a bolt cutter. But the boys
manage to find the keys in the immense clutter left behind by Crazy Carl, and the trap door opens
for them, leading to . . . nothing. Literally, nothing. The blackness beneath the house is
bottomless, unresponsive to illumination and swallows up anything they lower into it. When they
try a brief survey with a battery-powered video camera, the results are unusual. Think of that
quote at the beginning of
The Abyss about how when you look into
it, it looks back into
you.
As soon as the door has been opened, strange things begin happening to Lucas and Dane, and
then to Julie. Some of these events are real and leave physical evidence behind. Others are just
psychological—or maybe they, too, are physical, but some
thing removes the physical evidence.
Who knows? By the end of
The Hole, its supernatural metaphysics have emerged in broad
outline, but the details are left appropriately vague, as they should be.
Director Dante loves to riff on other movies, and he can be as clever about it as anyone working
today.
Gremlins 2's takes on
Gremlins are some of the best sequel jokes ever made. But
The
Hole isn't the best use of Dante's talents. The script by Smith pilfers ideas and whole sequences
from other, better films, and Dante dutifully energizes them with sufficient directorial technique
to keep
The Hole watchable, but not enough to make the overall enterprise seem new. Even if
you're just trying to forget everything and watch the film, which I always do, you keep feeling
the click of recognition. Oh look, there's the evil clown from
Poltergeist, but now he's wearing a
harlequin costume. There's the normal-looking fellow from
The Shining and
The Sixth Sense,
who turns around to reveal a grievous injury, because he's really a ghost. There's the invisible
force that pulls someone down into the water, but leaves behind a visible bruise, from the
Nightmare on Elm Street films. There's the weird, waking-dream movement of ghostly figures
popularized by Japanese horror films and their American remakes like
The Grudge. There's a
nightmare cityscape that looks like something Tim Burton imagined for
Beetlejuice's afterlife.
And there's a battle with a smaller but nasty-tempered creature staged just like the kitchen scene
in
Gremlins (and it ends roughly the same way too).
I suspect that Dante stuck close to elements that he was confident would work, because for him
the major experiment of
The Hole was 3D photography, and on a reported production budget of
only $12 million, he had no room for error. The results are certainly lively and engaging, with
Bruce Dern's scenes a standout, but Dante is capable of so much more. It's time to give him a
budget again and let him stretch.
The Hole Blu-ray, Video Quality
Dutch cinematographer Theo van de Sande is best known for his comedy work, primarily with
Adam Sandler, but he also shot the original
Blade, as well as the visually sumptuous
Cruel
Intentions. In
The Hole, he lights simply and realistically at the outset, then begins to push the
boundaries of reality—a little murkier here, a little glossier there—after the hole is opened and its
mysterious forces are let loose in the world.
It seems almost unfair to evaluate
The Hole as a 2D image, because that clearly isn't how director
Dante wanted it to be seen, but Big Air Studios' 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray offers a clean,
sharp, detailed image that is free of any issues. Colors are nicely saturated, flesh tones are
accurate and blacks are deep, which is essential once Lucas and Dane begin staring into the
depths of the hole. The film was a digital production from start to finish; so it's not surprising that the image showed no sign of the kind of artifacts
(artificial sharpening, high-frequency filtering) associated with film-to-digital transfers of pre-DI movies.
Although the extras are in HD, their total running time, along with the film is under two hours
and the disc has only one soundtrack. As a result, a BD-25 accommodates the material without
artifacts.
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