Hoping to learn about a family she never knew, Grace (Scout Taylor-Compton) is invited to a plantation home for a weekend by someone claiming to possess the answers she seeks. With her boyfriend, Jack (Nolan Gerard Funk, House at the End of the Street), in tow, she arrives to find the mansion spacious, yet empty of people. Oh, well — when in Rome (or South Carolina) …
Neither snakes nor satanic-looking symbols about the property scare them from B&Bing. Soon, a dead cat turns up gutted on the porch; next, robed figures hiding their faces with animal skulls and espousing a Cenobite-level obsession with pain do their best Purge formation stance surrounding the backyard; at each glance, their circle seems to get tighter. No wonder the movie is titled The Long Night; one hopes utilizing Ancestry.com isn’t this eerie.
More or less resigned to a horror-from-here-on-out career after earning the lead role in Rob Zombie’s rebooted Halloween pair, Taylor-Compton appears to have grown into it admirably, able to carry these films — workable or not — on her all-in shoulders. With The Long Night, she gets to check both “milky-eyed contacts” and “Regan MacNeil levitation” off her to-do list, as well as ground the weirdo-hallucinatory sequences that lend the flick a fentanyl-laced dose of the cosmic.
As director, Rich Ragsdale (The Curse of el Charro) makes prodigious use of drone footage and a score rivaling Cowboy Junkies for somnambulism to properly establish a definitive, deliberate mood before delving into story. The script, however, gets stuck somewhere around the second act, treading the same ground without actually progressing until the mouth finally catches the tail. In their small parts, Deborah Kara Unger (Silent Hill: Revelation) and Jeff Fahey (Body Parts) bring flashes of respite, but not surprise. —Rod Lott