Where the Devil Roams (2023) User Reviews

Strangeness

[BandSAboutMovies · 6/10 · 9 January 2024]

Zelda Adams, Lula Adams, John Adams and Toby Poser -- known as the Adams Family -- have made several films: Rumblestrips, The Hatred, Halfway to Zen, Knuckle Jack, The Shoot, The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender. Together, the family has directed and written this tale, which is the story of a family of murderous sideshow performers.

The sideshow that travels the country is filled with strangeness. There's Mr. Tipps (Sam Rodd), who has made a deal with a demon for a heart that he uses in his act. And that act? He cuts off his own fingers and then Eve Axon (Zelda Adams) sews them back on. She never speaks, only sings, and is the near-silent witness to the madness of her parents, Seven (John Adams) and Maggie (Tobey Poser) who have war and childhood trauma-caused PTSD that fuels them as they murder their way across the gray backroads of an anachronistic Depression-era setting that still has modern tattoos and fashions.

As Maggie murders, Eve films the madness while Seven blindfolds himself. Shot in their neighborhood -- Lulu shows up as an axe girl -- this feels bleached out and fuzzy, with a soundtrack by the Adams' band H6LLB6END6R. The Axon Family is on their way to a Buffalo horror show and things get darker as they go.

Any movie that starts with a legless man nearly dragging himself across the stage to read a poem about the demon Abaddon is going to get your attention. I'm excited that this movie is on Tubi -- previous Adams Family films were on Shudder -- as it allows them to reach a big audience with this color-shifting road movie. While there are some similarities to what has come before, this feels new and strange. In their notes for the film, the family said, "Creating our own supernatural mythologies is important and joyful for us - here shifting the biblical story of the fallen angel, Abaddon, into a love story that devolves into a family story (always and also built on love, in all its frailties), but refracted through the muddy, bloodied, cracked lens of personal traumas, unfortunate compulsions, and bitter victories."

Some of the CGI is a bit off, the juxtaposition between soundtrack and film may put some off, but by the end of this, you'll be captivated by something truly different. I can't wait to see what this family does next.

The Adams Family does sideshow

[Howling_at_the_Moon_Reviews · 6/10 · 10 January 2024]

Well, this is a first time for me.... never before have I finished a movie and immediately rewound it and watched it again. I was so intrigued, but felt like I missed out on so much of the story for various reasons and was not content with that haha.

The first thing you're likely to notice after the opening scene is the quality and style of the picture. It's so lovely and unique, it gives the entire film a very specific aesthetic vibe that I found very visually pleasing. Along with the picture, you are hit with disorienting music, wild imagery, and jarring characters that make you feel as if you're almost in a daze while viewing. 93% of the frames throughout this movie are so striking you could take a still at any given moment and frame it. There were also some shockingly successful practical effects in this. Tons of really awesome real to life and jarring gore. Unfortunately, the few green screen effects were not as successful. There are also plenty of Easter eggs and fun running themes throughout such as the shoes and the Frankensteined dolls and such. This is one to pay attention to so you can catch everything.

The acting here was really quite interesting. It was almost as if they were putting on this cultivated, stilted delivery that begged this almost dark, fanciful, dazed, story book atmosphere. Throughout the film I really enjoyed their odd family dynamic. They were presenting this almost "3 Wise Monkeys" theme that I found quite intriguing. The three of them did an excellent job. The entire experience was certainly on the thematically dark side, while being chock-full of symbolism, metaphors, allegories and nuanced messages... yet somehow, still managed to have an oddly lighthearted sensibility to it. It never felt like it was taking itself too seriously, despite the art house nature of it all.

As stated, I watched it a second time because I was a tad confused throughout and felt like I missed out on parts of the story that I wanted to partake in. I got much more out of it and enjoyed it even more the second go around. Unfortunately, you can guess the majority of people are not going to invest double the time into this, so I feel it won't reach as many people as it could. I do think there was a slight disconnect with the storytelling within the script that could've been addressed in the way of improving the viewer's accessibility and understanding of the plot.

Small example - a man says "They already took it" whereas, if he were to say "They already took it, the fat SOB came by today and made me sign it over"... it's not super spoonfed but makes me go "oh, that's who he is talking about". Little allusions such as this make it easier for the viewer to draw parallels and connections from scene to scene and character to character. I feel as though different occurrences of this were part of the reason I was confused during my first viewing. However, there is certainly something to be said for a sense of confusion and what that evokes. Not everything is meant to be explained or fully understood and I think this film is a good example of that. Even my second time there were things that went over my head and I could not decipher.

I have been a fan of this family and their work for quite some time now. I'm so pleased to see their success through bigger productions and quality work. I think they are innovative, original and creating truly unique work. As an indie actor, these are the kinds of productions I love to see and would kill to be in. This isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, but if it's not... go read a book lol. 6.5 rounding down to a 6, would recommend.

This family is getting better and better with every film they make

[jtindahouse · 7/10 · 28 September 2023]

Short review: 'Where the Devil Roams' made me really happy. To see a family making independent horror movies is terrific, but these are anything but your average home movies. This one is made with a lot of class. It's extremely dark in the early going, but it isn't afraid to throw in some moments of humour. And it's absolutely funny stuff, but the tone is so dark you can almost feel bad for laughing.

This one was described to me before going in as a slow-burn, but I'm not sure I'd agree with that assessment. There's a hell of a lot of violence and mayhem for a 'Slow-burn". Then the twisted ending is the cherry on top. I enjoyed this movie. 7/10.

Art for Art's Sake. Not for the Audience.

[kb-62551 · 3/10 · 10 January 2024]

I really love the other titles this family has given us. My expectations for a film are rather particular and my tastes are a little exacting. Not many pictures particularly move me. When I heard Wonder Wheel had a new movie, I was genuinely excited. Trying to keep my hopes in check, I still knew they're not going to shy away from making a gripping movie that's unafraid of a supernatural concept. The creepy carnival gig is right up my proverbial street.

But there's so little plot. This isn't a movie so much as an art project and a showcase for their daughter's ability to sing a capella.

I respect what they were going for, I respect what they were trying to accomplish but it's not for me, as much as I really wanted it to be.

Interesting horror.

[dweston-38669 · 20 November 2023]

The filmmaking Adams family make low budget,chilly horrors that are several cuts above the usual stalk and slash horrors that populate the market. They have a keen eye for character and atmosphere that make for a more subtle horror, with well drawn characters that add to a rather brave whole.

Unfortunately here the plot is bogged down with tedious hallucinationary scenes, an overlong opening that doesn't excite or grab the audience but is daring nonetheless, and a music video that plays weirdly at the end- It adds nothing really.

The piercings and tattoos on the carnival workers,seem too modernistic out of place , like Lucy Osbourne appeared,minus her sodding phone!

The CGI on the WW1 scenes are a little too unsubtle.

Nonetheless, I applaud this family of filmmakers for trying to appeal to the more adult of horror fans. The designs and cinematography effectively evoke the back roads of 30s Catskills, the chilly look got to my bones and they look of the time and place.

After a couple of predictable' found footage' films of late at least these guys know there is room for low budget horror to develop interesting ideas rather than cliched use of the camera and lines of dialogue.

It could have been better but overall a memorable little chiller.

The Adams Family are back with their homespun brand of magical realism.

[Otkon · 7/10 · 13 January 2024]

And this one is out there. In my best estimate, it is as though they have pureed Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and distilled that into a feature-long Dresden Dolls music video.

Set during the Great Depression, it's a tale of ukeleles, dronecore, baby shoes, shell shock and side-show extremity regeneration. As with most of their previous offerings, the Adamses have done a lot of lore and world-crafting but leave a good deal of it unexplained. Weird things just happen in their films as if all is normal.

And I am totally fine with that.

They are making films they want to make - which is admirable in its own right.

Is it shot on a budget? Sure.

Is the acting oddly stilted? Absolutely.

But that is the charm. Like John Waters carefree guerilla cinema style. They're just making quirky horror in upstate NY with anachronistic scoring with no fear of taking things in odd directions. And that is what makes their movies interesting and different.

This one maintains that trend.

Visually beautiful, but dreadful film

[mcg69 · 1/10 · 22 October 2023]

This would've been a lot better as a short film and hopefully that concise format would've actually gotten the point of it across. It was painful to sit through and the only way I got through it was by laughing at how absurdly serious they were taking themselves throughout the entire film. Their cinematography has improved since Hellbender and I enjoyed the atmospheric music, but other than those two elements, I have nothing positive to say about this film. As a horror fan and someone who generally loves things to do with carnival settings, I would not recommend this film. If you really want to see it, wait until it comes into a streaming service so you're not paying any extra for it.

Family business

[kosmasp · 9/10 · 1 September 2023]

No pun intended - you can tell that this movie is not one to easily rate - considering the two different experiences you can read about here in the reviews. I do understand that the other reviewer had issues with it - the Adams family (the name alone made them a perfect fit to make movies, right?) do movies that are ... well they are not meant to be mainstream at all. So you have to dive in them with an open mind. Like what is the story here? What are the lessons? Is there any moral code? Just free your mind from any restrictions and you'll be fine.

Do not try to think in boxes. You have quite a few great characters in here. Most seems patch or rather piece work. Like a puzzle that may not look like it is fitting together - but once you've assembled it, it totally makes sense. Well maybe not totally, but you get what I mean ... hopefully. There are quite a few easter eggs hidden in this (like a Karloff sign, which apparently was inserted digitally after the fact as the director told me) ... and the creepiness factor is quite high. This is also a love letter to black and white horror movies ... again, it may be tough to get a hold on the movie, but do not even try to do that ... if you like weird ... well you could do worse.

A depressingly bad depression-era oddity.

[BA_Harrison · 1/10 · 26 August 2023]

Nonsensical self-indulgent garbage that feels like an eternity, Where The Devil Roams opens with a man reciting a poem in front of an audience. It goes on and on and on. Every time you think he's finished, he starts another verse. I almost crumbled before the film had really began. Amazingly, this isn't the worst thing about this interminably dull, totally baffling mess that could only appeal to the most pretentious of movie viewers - those who might consider the more experimental work of David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky far too accessible and mainstream.

From what I could gather, the story involves a murderous husband/wife/daughter trio of carnival performers who go on the road after stealing a supernatural heart and sewing needle that enables them to reattach severed limbs as though they had never been detached. When the husband and wife are mutilated in an axe attack, the daughter patches them up using the heart and needle, but finds that she needs to regularly replace the hacked off limbs with fresh appendages when the old ones start to go mouldy. This leads to plenty of carnage, which could have been a whole load of gory fun if only the directors (it took three of them to film this mess) hadn't opted for such an incomprehensible and utterly tedious arthouse approach. Rarely have I longed so hard for a film to end (unfortunately, every time it seems like it's about to finish, another scene kicks in).

1/10, although I would rate it 0/10 if I could: that pointless scene where two characters haggle over the price of a room for the night made me want to put my foot through the screen (I'm glad I didn't: it was an IMAX screen and that might have been costly).

Poetic Dark Fantasy

[kmerlkey · 9/10 · 25 November 2023]

After waiting for the film to be available on Demand, I was finally able to watch it last night and I enjoyed it immensely. I have seen KNUCKLE JACK, THE DEEPER YOU DIG, and HELLBENDER. It is the same voice of the Adams Family in those films that you'll find in this one. It opens with a vaudevillian style reading of a poem filmed with a black & white vignette. The poem, read by a tattooed and pierced amputee is the theme and main plot device of the entire film as it deals with loneliness and longing among the outcast, neglected, and broken. It follows a small family Seven (John Adams), Maggie (Toby Poser), and Eve (Zelda Adams), in a Northeast carnival circuit after World War I. At times the setting is hard to maintain and draws attention away from the story (like well maintained and paved rural roads) but the award winning cinematography makes up for it by keeping the mood set in a cold, unforgiving world where people on the fringe of society still want to be loved.

I would recommend this and any Adam's Family film to any movie lover that wanted something unique, original, and full of heart. It took a moment for me to warm up to it, but even being a fan of the filmmakers, but once I did I was reminded why I'm a fan.

Barely worthwhile unless you're looking for a specific quality here

[kannibalcorpsegrinder · 2/10 · 23 February 2024]

Living in a floundering carnival, a group of workers trying to make due during the Great Depression find themselves under the spell of a gruesome object in the possession of a popular act in the carnival with them which forces them into a massive killing spree to find a better life for themselves.

This was a massively disappointing and nearly unwatchable genre effort. Among it's only positive points here stem from the technical qualities on display which are genuinely impressive at capturing a haunting, dark mood. The period setting, the miserable existence working in the type of environment that looks like a soul-crushing existence, and the general lifestyle of the various participants they stumble across in the rampage they commit secures this kind of atmosphere incredibly well. Even with the way this plays out that shows the descent into madness that they fall into, with each of the family members shown to have a special liability that helps to make the plight seem all the more dynamic and ingrained into this atmospheric setting. Coupled rather nicely with the genuinely gruesome and bloody kills featured here which come about not just through the carnival acts but also the incredibly graphic murders they engage in as the sense of the curse carries out, these are enough to give this one some positives. There are some massively disappointing detriments on display with this one. The main drawback here is the absolutely draining and just plain dull pace that this one plays at where it's not really that interesting in the slightest. The tempo is a major part of this where it's just so slow-going and plodding that there's very little chances to do something interesting with a clunk storyline that doesn't warrant this type of length so it's sluggish means of carrying out the family's destructive rampage or the inner workings of the carnival where their work with the sacred heart for their deal is all just so bland and dull it's not that interesting. That factor is the other big factor here, where even though this goes for the type of in-depth analysis on the family it does very little make them endearing or worth following in this type of feature as so little of it tends to just become quite uninteresting. Added with some obvious anachronistic tendencies that give its setting away, these bring the film down overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

Great Premise and Setting for Horror

[Reviews_of_the_Dead · 8/10 · 22 November 2023]

This was a movie that I was excited to check out since it was making its festival rounds. My friends over at Eternal Darkness of a Not So Spotless Mind were high on this one. When I saw it was playing at the Gateway Film Center, I made it a point to see it before it left. Outside of just knowing that the Adams family was behind this, I went blind. I did love the title though.

Synopsis: traces a family of murderous sideshow performers as it travels around the world on the dying carnival circuit.

We start this off by seeing a stage and an audience. This is filmed in black and white. The master of ceremonies, Justin Julio, comes out and recites a poem. This contains the title of the movie. It is from there we shift to Eve (Zelda Adams) as she walks along the road. She goes into a local store and steals an apple. While there, Mr. Tipps (Sam Rodd) comes in to buy a pair of scissors. He also seems to know what she did.

Mr. Tipps works at the same carnival that Eve does. He has the most popular act of the sideshow. Eve does hers with her mother and father, Maggie (Toby Poser) and Seven (John Adams). We also met Nezumi Onna (Hitomi Nakamura) and the other performers.

I've already said that Mr. Tipps is the biggest draw in this carnival. The reason is that he cuts off his fingers while preaching to the audience. He can reattach his fingers after each performance. Eve watches to see that he's made a deal with the devil, having a heart that he brings his needle and thread through. Now that Eve knows his secret, he demands that she keep it a secret and not try to steal his magic.

There are scenes of violence and this family that we follow aren't always on the straight and narrow. Eve wants to get her act into the Buffalo Horror Show and it seems like she will do this at any cost. That includes stealing and murder.

That is where I'll leave my recap and introduction to the characters. Now I do need to make a confession. I absolutely must rewatch this movie before making my end of year show. Part of is that I went to see this while I was too tired. I dozed off. This is not a reflection on the movie, but more of me being too warm and just being exhausted that day. If anyone who was in this or helped made this sees this comment, it isn't a reflection on anything you did. This does interesting things and I'm mad at myself. I will make up with a second watch to fill in gaps.

Now that I've said that I love that this is a period piece. Something I haven't said yet is that Seven is a World War I veteran. What he did and experienced during the war has scarred him. The sight of blood causes him to lock up. This gets interesting with the changes that are made to their act. There is something ironic about their act in that Eve dresses like an angel for it. Her name is also the name of the first woman according to the bible. She is the one that tried the forbidden fruit due to the goading of Satan as a serpent. Since this movie is about making Faustian deals with the devil, I'm sure these were done intentionally. I found that creative.

Circling back to what I was saying with this being set when it is. I think part of this is done since sideshows are no longer a thing. Carnivals themselves are drastically different. This family could also get away with things like they do since they're transient people. There have been serial killers that were like this whether it was carnies or truck drivers. Police work wasn't like it was today and these people wouldn't be around long enough to be caught.

The last bit of the story to include here is that we have this ritual, but it is a minor part of the story. It is extremely important so what I mean here is that we see Mr. Tipps doing this. From there, we know that Eve takes the magic. We don't delve too much into the ins and outs there though. We just know that it works and is the catalyst to where things go from the first act. It feels to me that the Adams family knows enough and that suffices for me.

Where I'll then go would be the acting. I thought that Poser and Zelda Adams carried this film. That's not to say that John Adams isn't good though. His character is just so rocked by what happened to him during the war that it broke him. Poser and Zelda have a strong relationship and the former is doing what she can to help develop her daughter. The problem there though is that we have a dark coming of age tale for Zelda. She fits this role so well and she's such a solid actress that just keeps getting better to me with each performance. I also thought that Rodd was solid in his role. He is that one that dangles the 'forbidden fruit' in front of Eve. I'd also say that Nakamura, Robert Lund, Stephen O'Donnell, Julio, Nathaniel Meek, Lulu Adams and the rest of the cast rounded this out for what was needed. They have minor roles but are still important for the development of what we get here.

All that is left then is filmmaking. The cinematography here is good. It does well to capture the time it is set. I'd also say that the framing was good as well. They strategically use close shots to hide things. The effects we got looked good. There is a creepy atmosphere that this built so I appreciated that. Something else that worked was the soundtrack. Interestingly, the music used was created by this family. The selections fit here so well, even if it isn't necessarily from the era. It isn't in the world of the movie so that makes it work for me.

In conclusion, this is a solid movie. I enjoyed their last one of Hellbender and we are seeing this family get even better. Part of that could be a bigger budget as well. Regardless we have an interesting period piece. I love the allegories that are hidden here with religion. The acting is good. Poser and Zelda Adams lead the way there. The rest push their characters to where they end up. This is well-made. The cinematography, effects and soundtrack being the strong points there. I rather enjoyed this and am excited now for that rewatch. This lived up to the hype of what others were saying in my opinion as well.

My Rating: 8 out of 10.

"Looks Like The Devil's Got A New Dance Partner!"...

[azathothpwiggins · 2 April 2024]

WHERE THE DEVIL ROAMS is another creepy film from The Adams clan. Set during the Great Depression era, we are taken along with a family of three carnival performers (John Adams, Toby Poser, and Zelda Adams), as they embark on their spree of grisly murder.

Known for making the best of meager funds, this movie is no exception. As usual, the story is unique and gruesome, and the practical gore effects are well-realized. It's cool to see a family of filmmakers put together such a dark genre effort. The music -also performed by the Adamses- is a sort of ethereal sounding gloom-metal that might not have been around in the 1930s, but fits the overall mood of the film.

Recommended for those who appreciate low-budget horror movies that are quite out of the ordinary...

Talk about different!

[song_of_rainbow · 9/10 · 7 January 2024]

This is as twisted as any movie can get. Completely different experience, watching it. Took me back to the 1800's and forward to when the freak shows finally ended. Not that I'm that old but old enough to have watched some of those insane movies in the 1950's (mostly in the middle of the night when only somewhat warped people would watch them). I agree with one of the reviewers comments: "Like a puzzle that may not look like it is fitting together... it totally makes sense". Yes I got what the person meant. Not for the faint of hear. At times, I was not sure I would watch to the end, but I did and glad of it.