The Pale Door
You don’t watch a movie like Aaron B. Koontz's The Pale Door, you rewrite it in your head. Old West outlaws facing off against a coven of witches, that’s a good start for the story, it’s simply a question of restructuring everything else, like getting rid of the pointless backstory, or letting one of the already few non-white characters make it to the end alive, or maybe cutting down the number of hypermacho mustachioed men to two rather than five, or giving the witches any other motivation for their behavior than needing virgin blood to survive. Any one of those changes would have at least slightly improved The Pale Door. Sadly, it’s an inert, dreadfully dull mess that tries for some From Dusk Till Dawn-style “you thought it was this kind of movie, but it’s really this kind of movie” shenanigans, and falls flat. Continue Reading →