joel schumacher

Joel Schumacher has a couple of solid films to his credit -- Falling Down, The Lost Boys, Veronica Guerin and a few more -- and even his failures prove to be stylish at the very least (The Number 23, those Batman sequels that shall remain nameless). So what is his name doing on something as skimpy and unremarkable as Blood Creek (a.k.a Town Creek, a.k.a Creek, and not to be confused with this 2006 Canadian horror of the same name), which is being dumped in second-run theaters as we speak?

We open with a black-and-white prologue set in the 1930's, marking Nazi occult expert Michael Fassbender's arrival at a modest West Virginia farm that happens to have a perfectly good rune stone beneath its barn. Cut to present day and switch to color -- EMT Henry Cavill finds himself greeted by his long-lost brother (Dominic Purcell), who disappeared in the woods up around Town Creek and was presumed dead. He's heading back there, definitely with some guns and with or without his brother's help. Cavill gives in and comes with, though what they find up at that farm makes their agreed-upon no-questions-asked policy a hell of a lot harder to abide...