Body Keepers

2018 USA

***

In Colorado, two children go missing. Seemingly vanishing into thin air from their kitchen while their mother went to answer the door. They aren’t the only ones. Also in the news is the shifting of an elderly man’s corpse from a liquid nitrogen facility to a local backyard shed in Nederland, Colorado. The body of “Grandpa” will be kept cold with dry ice. What does all that have to do with the missing kids? I’m not quite sure but since it was front page news on the newspaper that spun across the screen during the opening credits, I can only assume it will be important. Anyways. The missing siblings are never found and neither is another boy who vanished. Two years later and a mismatched group of youthful dopes who mostly hate each other are all speculating what happened to a local girl who has gone missing. On her walk home from the local hang, The Pioneer (where she denied head jock any goth-girl-fun), Audrey runs into multiple suspicious characters before making it home. A drunk teacher who is definitely a creep, a police officer who is also a creep, a dog who is not a creep and is a very good boy, are all met on her nighttime trek. Before she can make it into her house, some heavy-breathing weirdo she recognizes approaches her and snatches her up. An argument about the missing girl forces the teacher to put all the arguing students together on a team for some festival competition. They ain’t happy about it. There’s a couple socially awkward nerds (Jack and Brianna), the bitchy cheerleader Heather, her cheating jock boyfriend Tanner, her sassy gay friend Tristan and the missing goth girl’s bestie Ivy who looks like a teenage girl cosplaying as Saraya from AEW or WWE’s Paige if that’s more your speed. They get together to discuss how they’re going to win the annual wheelbarrow race they’ve been teamed up for. They need a wheelbarrow (obviously) and they know of one by “Grandpa’s” shed that the “Body Keepers” use to switch out the dry ice. We also get filled in on the history of this Grandpa guy who was a professor that figured out how to transfer souls in a gambit to live forever. He was stopped by being frozen alive… makes sense. Dismissed as bullshit by some, the group land on stealing the wheelbarrow from Grandpa’s shed. The fools open up the coffin in the shed and things go south is the budget-retrained way one should have expected. The group stay by Heather’s house for the night and Jack (who got touched by the corpse in the casket) grows ill and is visited by the spirits of one of the kids who warns him that Grandpa’s touch is pretty much a death sentence. The Body Keepers grab Jack that night and spooky-shit nightmares serve as dire omens for the others. A trip to a psychic at the high school Halloween festival (I didn’t know that was a thing, Colorado be wild) leads to Ivy, Brianna and Tristan getting warned about the doom coming their way. They ignore the psychic premonition and their missing friends and go to party by Heather’s house where they play a drinking game to Jenga… Colorado, yo. While this game goes on there’s a song playing that sounds like Red Hot Chili Peppers mixed with The Spin Doctors… I had no idea there was a way to make something sound worse than the Red Hot Chili Peppers but wow. Ivy and Tanner go back to the shed because they believe it may hold the key to what happened to the missing goth girl. There’s a silly twist waiting to be revealed, audio issues that hit at the most inopportune time, acting performances from actual locals, a hilariously awful ending and a lovely level of backyard effort that just warms my heart.

Regional flare keeps me smiling and I am deeply shocked about how this group of kids are way more likable than they should be. It’s in defiance of everything I know about a teen-led horror flick. Community matters, especially when it comes to the production of a horror film that has the grasp of a great idea but just doesn’t know exactly how to communicate it. Is it awkward? Yes. Of course it is. But, man, do I respect the hell out of it. Released twenty years earlier and this shit would have a slipcase and be a Saturn Video drop.