Back in 2012 a little horror anthology called V/H/S was released, with its premise being that all its segments were of the found footage variety. One of the stories featured in it was Amateur Night, in which a trio of unpleasant college-age students pick up the wrong girl on a night out and pay for it in a very bloody way. It was very well received by fans and critics alike and so it was decided to make a feature-length movie based on it - or to be exact, on the 'girl' at the centre of the story, Lily, which became SiREN.
Jonah is getting married in a week, and so his brother has arranged his batchelor party for him. They and two of Jonah's friends, Rand and Elliott, plan to have a night of drinking (and shrooms) and enjoying themselves at a strip club, where the lap dances will flow like wine (for Jonah at least).. When Jonah's brother Mac meets the mysterious Mr. Nyx (no relation to Nyx the Puritan) and learns about Nyx's club/brothel, he decides that they just have to go there. Once there, Jonah meets the mysterious and alluring Lily, who has the ability to enthrall men and bring them to ecstasy with just the sound of her voice and is kept shackled in a room locked from the outside. Jonah, being a nice guy, decides that Lily must need rescuing and breaks her out. This turns out to be a big mistake, of course, because now not only does Mr. Nyx want his property back, but Lily is now free to do as she pleases, which is bad news for any male she does not "like"...
Amateur Night was one of, if not the, best segments in the first V/H/S anthology, and so I had quite high hopes for this feature-length expansion on the story. SiREN is also directed by Gregg Bishop, who directed the relatively good Dante The Great segment from V/H/S: Viral, and so things were on course to be pretty good. Unfortunately I think that SiREN ended up putting too many interesting ideas into a film which already had one very interesting idea at its centre, and as a result several things that could have been good or might have even deserved their own story fell by the wayside and the film became rather too full of things for its own good. Perhaps the biggest example of this would be the female bartender at Mr. Nyx's club - when we first meet her she is mixing drinks with what appear to be leeches that have disturbing hallucinogenic effects on the drinkers; it turns out that the leeches are actually growing out of her head and can apparently be used to transfer memories and experiences from one person to another when they are consumed. I found this concept to be fascinating and probably deserving of its own movie, but she's really only used for a couple of scenes, one of which is half-throwaway, half-"funny". Or maybe I should stop becoming fascinated with supporting characters over the main characters of a film.
We do learn a good deal more about the mysterious "Lily". Summoned at the beginning of the film by a group of occultists who are swiftly dispatched by the very creature they called, Lily is some sort of demon with the powers of the sirens from the Greek myths - creatures who enchanted sailors with their voices and caused them to shipwreck on the rocks. She still has the claws, wings and split face from Amateur Night, but here they've been joined by a multi-function prehensile tail as well (and one of those functions is apparently a prostate massager that gets put to use in one scene that's almost certainly a rape scene). We also are told that Lily's species "mate for life", and so I'm sure you can imagine the problems that this ultimately causes our protagonist Jonah...
Overall though, I found SiREN to be disappointingly average. Jonah and his groomsmen never really grabbed me as particularly compelling, especially as you knew at least two of them were most likely marked as being not long for this world (especially the one who announced he was the designated driver just before wolfing down some shrooms). Is this another case of a movie being so anticipated that, when it comes out, it just can't live up to what people have imagined in their minds? Maybe. Perhaps if the film had focussed more on Mr. Nyx's bordello/fetish club of the damned (are all his employees supernatural beings of some kind? There's a suggestion of there being other clubs like his run elsewhere in the world and they're in competition - what's up with that? And what was the deal with all the seemingly disabled war veterans there as customers?) I would have found things more interesting. Finally, the film's ending was rather predictable and anticlimactic - it didn't really surprise or impress me in the slightest.
Amazon UK (Region One)
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