‘The Void’ is a rabbit-hole of awesomeness

In screening a film for this week’s column, I found myself headfirst down a rabbit-hole of awesomeness of which I had previously been unaware.

Astron-6 is a collective of creative Canadians who have crafted a number of trailers for fictitious films that could have easily been found on the shelves of your neighborhood VHS rental shop in the ‘80s. With titles such as “Insanophenia,” “Manborg,” and “Lazer Ghosts 2: Return to Laser Cove,” the group’s output demonstrated a love for the underbelly of direct-to-video gems that were the hallmarks of the “Be Kind. Rewind” generation.

The group has also crafted a few features from their trailers, including the gleeful grindhouse send-up “Father’s Day” in 2011, and the playful ode to the giallo genre, “The Editor” in 2014.

“The Void,” the latest film from most of the crew (available on demand through iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and Amazon streaming), does not carry the Astron-6 label, but it certainly delivers all the same loving shout-outs to the genre films of that golden era of the ‘70s and ‘80s, where names like John Carpenter, Lucio Fulci and Stuart Gordon ruled the video shelves with their monster-based visions of hellish horror.

And while the typical tongue-in-cheek nature of Astron-6’s previous efforts has been ditched for more straightforward scares, they still manage to put the “love” in their Lovecraft-ian vision.

“The Void” opens with local cop Daniel Carter (played by Aaron Poole) enjoying another sleepy night on duty when he views a seemingly disoriented young man crawling in his headlights. He brings him to the local hospital that is working with a skeleton crew, as it has suffered fire damage and is consolidating with a larger facility in town.

The hospital staff is pared down to Daniel’s ex (played by Kathleen Munroe) and her mentor (played by Kenneth Welsh) as the only doctors on duty. Before you can say “Halloween II,” freaky things start to surround this impromptu visit, including a drop-by from a heavily armed yokel (played by Daniel Fathers) and his son, a teen on the verge of delivering a baby, a nurse who apparently isn’t comfortable in her own skin (so she begins slicing it off), and a gaggle of robed, knife-wielding cult members who have menacingly surrounded the building.

It’s evident throughout that directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski have done their horror homework, with echoes of “Halloween,” “Hellraiser,” “The Thing,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and any number of lesser films of that era. They dispense with the traditional absurdist humor that marks some of their earlier work and replace it with an ode to H. P. Lovecraft that strangely seems right at home as the film creeps toward its insane, otherworldly climax.

Not to dismiss their earlier work, but their dips into parody are relatively low-hanging fruit for their talent, and here they graduate from winking and nodding to more straightforward storytelling which demonstrates their most accomplished work to date.

And in a departure from the typically snarky Astron-6 crew work, they have demonstrated that, when it comes to delivering horror, they are worth taking seriously.