The Pale Door

watchable

The Pale Door (2020) is what you get when you cross a amateur western with cliched horror elements.... what you mean, it doesn't sound good?!

It does start out very promising. They build up the rapport between characters in a decent way and the whole heist seems like an interesting thing. The horror part when starting out is still good, but then it falls apart fast after that. There should have been more lingering threat there, but the witch things just appear and then it goes into the action territory and loses any horror factor that it had to begin with. A lot of potential is wasted here with the script.

Quite considerate of the witches to arrange their psychic witch attacks around the defenseless heroes' cathartic confessions to one another. Almost worth watching for Melora Walters and Bill Sage camping it up as, respectively, the coven's witch-madam and a crusty 19th-century outlaw who seems to implausibly prefer the word "brothel" to "whorehouse", "cathouse", "gashpalace", "cocktrough", "boobdello", "Mary-go-round", "cherry-go-round", or any number of other well-documented slang terms.

Begins a bit too slow even for me, then finally becomes interesting midway through. The cast makes up for a pretty thin story.

Bleh. Great premise, ruined by terrible acting and a horrible cinematography.