‘Where the Devil Roams’ Defies Categorization, Other Than Being Worth Seeing

“Where the Devil Roams” is the kind of thing I keep hoping to encounter in museums of contemporary art — you know, inside those darkened galleries in which viewers are expected to hunker down on bean bag chairs or something equally uncomfortable in order to take in avant-gardist video installations. What one usually experiences in these situations is propaganda of a peculiarly aggrieved sort or artless montages set to backdrops of thrumming sounds. Unless clock-watching counts as an aesthetic response, these objets d’ art, whether low-fi or high-tech, tend to be thin gruel for the soul.Not so “Where the Devil Roams,” the new movie written, directed, and starring John Adams, Tobey Poser, and Zelda Adams. Would that our museum-certified artistes had the cunning, know-how, and visionary reach of the Adams family and their nifty little horror film.Yes, that’s right: the Adams family, but not Morticia, Gomez, and the other denizens of Charles Addams’ classic New Yorker cartoons. Rather, husband John, wife Tobey, and daughters Zelda and Lulu, all proud citizens of Roscoe, New York, a hamlet of some 500-people about a two-hour drive from Manhattan.Mr. Adams is a former model, having worked for Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein. Ms. Poser is an actress who’s been on the stage and in the soaps, as well as “Sex and the City.” When confronted by illness, parenthood, and the vagaries of professional life, the couple began making their own “no budget” movies with growing daughters in tow. As Zelda and Lulu came of age, their input into the family’s cinematic ventures grew as well. For how much longer is a good question: Zelda has moved onto a modeling career. Striking a pose, it seems, runs in the family.Zelda Adams and Sam Rodd in ‘Where the Devil Roams.’ Via Yellow Veil Pictures“Where the Devil Roams” is an ingenious confection, a grimy and often gory tale that is at once bound by history (Depression-era America) and defiantly anachronistic (punk in attitude, players, and soundtrack). It details a family shattered by war, wracked by poverty, and, ultimately, beholden to otherworldly powers.They make their way as circus performers, with an act that poaches upon Christian iconography of a rather saccharine sort. Along the way, murders are committed in the cause of economic warfare, lack of neighborliness, and, increasingly, the collection of spare body parts. The family’s mode of transport is a ’31 Chevy; their emotional affect, stoic. Seven, Maggie, and Eve — respectively, Mr. Adams, Ms. Tobey, and Ms. Adams — are, in their own way, not-so-distant cousins of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.”The prologue to the film is tell-tale. A legless performer with ornate tattoos and elaborate piercings waddles on his hands across a stage and proceeds to read the title poem to a theater packed with well-heeled, whitebread patrons. His articulation is stilted; the film, black-and-white; the sound, somewhat tinny. The performer is here-and-now; the audience, cut-and-pasted from a film circa-1930. The allusion to Tod Browning’s “Freaks” is unmistakable, as is the cinematic artifice. The latter may be due to financial constraints, but it is also an integral component of an aesthetic strategy. The Adams’s film may be a shoestring venture and, at moments, shaky in its acting, but it has also been exquisitely calibrated and cleverly nipped-and-tucked. Close-ups are predominant and compositions are composed with evident care. The color and grain of the film change, almost surreptitiously, throughout the proceedings to suit the story. Digital hocus-pocus has been applied sparingly and is endowed with an odd, handmade character. Practical effects courtesy of Trey Lindsay are all-too-convincing. Economy of means can result in artistic ingenuity. Here is Exhibit A proving as much.What can this kind-of-but-not-really home movie be compared to? Cultish fare like “Eraserhead,” for sure, but there are also echoes of “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928), Walker Evans, Andrew Wyeth, Ingmar Bergman, and, if I’m not mistaken, Paul Cezanne. Keep an eye out for cinematic Easter eggs — I spied a fleeting shout-out to Boris Karloff — and note both the understatement and the clarity of the editing. Here is a rarity: a straight-faced horror film that sends out nods and winks — not with condescension, but with love. Who needs Hollywood when you’ve got Roscoe to call home?‘Where the Devil Roams’ will be playing November 2-8 at Alamo Drafthouse, Manhattan, with two of the directors, John and Zelda Adams, in attendance for Q&A on November 3 (7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. shows).

‘Where the Devil Roams’ Defies Categorization, Other Than Being Worth Seeing

‘Where the Devil Roams’ Defies Categorization, Other Than Being Worth Seeing

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