Crew
Director – Steven R. Monroe, Screenplay – Chuck Reeves, Producer – Lindsay MacAdam, Photography – Thomas Harting, Music – Pinar Toprak, Visual Effects – Worldwide FX (Supervisor – Dobri Georgiev & Maria Mavrova), Special Effects Supervisor – David Barkes, Makeup Effects – Flesh and Fantasy (Prosthetics – Ryan Nicolson), Production Design – Renee Read. Production Company – Insight Film Studios.
Cast
Chelan Simmons (Hope Henry), John Schneider (Bartlett Henry), Ryan Kennedy (Mike), Katharine Isabelle (Jessica), Brendan Fletcher (Stephen Chandler), Andrew Wheeler (Franklin), Kyle Labine (Terry), Kimberly Warnat (Leah), John Shaw (Giles), Alex Zahara (Lawrence), Don Thompson (Sheriff Loodey), Simon Longmore (Deputy Anderson)
Plot
Ellensford, Pennsylvania, 1859. The town is struck with plague and so the locals turn to the magi Bartlett Henry to protect them. Henry agrees as long as he is made the town magistrate. He uses his magical abilities to conduct a deal to deliver the town from the plague, which requires that one among them be chosen each year on the solstice as sacrifice to the ogre in the forest. In the present-day, Terry leads a group of friends through the woods in search of Ellensford, which has become a lost village. They find it, only for some of the group to be snatched by the ogre and others made prisoner by the townspeople, who are still alive and unchanged after nearly 150 years. The locals intend to sacrifice them to the ogre. However, their being there challenges the social order and threatens to expose the town’s secrets.
Steven R. Monroe is a prolific genre director who has been making a series of films since the 2000s that have mostly aired on the Syfy Channel. These include the likes of The Contract (2002), House of 9 (2005), It Waits (2005), Left in Darkness (2006), Sasquatch Mountain (2006), Dual (2008), Storm Cell (2008), Ice Twisters (2009), Wyvern (2009), Mongolian Death Worm (2010), Jabberwock (2011), MoniKa (2012), End of the World (2013), Grave Halloween (2013), The Exorcism of Molly Hartley (2015), Teardrop (2022) and Unborn (2022). The two films that Monroe gained a certain notoriety for was the remake of I Spit on Your Grave (2010) and its sequel I Spit on Your Grave 2 (2013). Ogre was a Canadian-shot production, picked up for release by US-based CineTel films and screened on The Sci-Fi Channel (back before it became the Syfy Channel).
The film has an interesting set-up, although you get the impression it was more a case of the production crew being given a title to make a film and then being forced to come up with something about an ogre. The setting is like a tv budget version of the one we get in the subsequent The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015), albeit without the same ear for period setting or dialogue. The village out of time idea is one borrowed from Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), which in turn was lifted from the musical Brigadoon (1954).
The lead-in is passable, but the film starts to sink the moment the ogre is introduced a few minutes in. It is created by CGI effects that look datedly cheap no matter what way you look at them. There is the inevitable point where the village is encountered by a group of modern teenagers, which drags the idea down further. Ogre is a film that I could see having worked through a better budget and director. As it is, it feels made with a perfunctory adequacy but little more than that. In other words, it is exactly what you would have expected from a tv movie production. Interest does perk up somewhat during the latter sections where Ryan Kennedy marshals the villagers to stand up against the ogre and kill it using himself as bait.
The cast line-up includes Katharine Isabelle, then riding on the success of the cult Ginger Snaps (2000), who has an eminently forgettable throwaway role as the airhead among the teens. I didn’t much buy former The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-85) star John Schneider with mascared eyes acting all imperious as the warlock. On the other hand, I did like the fresh and innocent Chelan Simmons, the grown-up version of the kid who was killed in the opening scene of the original tv version of It (1990), who gives a performance of fine purity and moral strength.
Trailer here