Everybody hold hands, this could be a rough ride.
At the end of The Valdemar Legacy (2010) my Arts Editor and I yelled, “What?!?!?!”, but not in a good way. This story – or beginning of a story, more likely – splits its time between the roughly current era, where a real estate evaluator in a South American country is sent to value a house and its contents for tax purposes has disappeared, assumed to have made off with some sort of treasure. A second, sent to do the work of the first, discovers things that viciously go bump in the attic, rescuers who confine her under the excuse of bad weather destroying the roads, and an overall negative vibe, one might say.
The other half of the movie? Well, Aleister Crowley shows up (and is exceedingly well done in this flick), so call it the start of the 20th century. A young couple, who spend their time matching orphans with childless couples when they’re not on their rather nice estate, is itself childless due to an illness in the mother, Leonor. The husband, Lázaro, and his wife made their money conducting fake séances, and that has attracted the attention of Crowley. He believes that the fake séances have weakened the walls between various realities, and Lázaro will make a perfect link between them.
He entices Lázaro with the idea of curing his wife, but when Crowley and his group gather to run a real séance, events go awry as a monster from the other side climbs through and proceeds to lay waste to the countryside.
And that’s just about where it stops. What the hell?
So be warned. It’s not a badly done movie from a technical standpoint, and I was appropriately creeped out by Crowley. But the reasons for, well, a story within a story approach were not well laid out, and makes it a little frustrating to follow, especially given this abrupt ending. A sequel appears to have been released in 2011, but whether it finishes up the story in a satisfying way is not known to us.
