Kolobos

If you’ve never actually heard of Kolobos, don’t feel bad… the 1999 horror offering represents the deepest of cinematic deep cuts, even for devoted fans of the genre. Attempting to navigate the post-Scream meta-slasher landscape, the film enjoys a kinship of sorts with another ambitiously low-budget feature (also conceived, coincidentally, by an unheralded directing duo) that released that very same year - The Blair Witch Project (albeit with a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the cultural impact). And yet, in their own way, both movies sought to challenge and redefine the established boundaries of the horror genre… with Kolobos blending reality television and torture porn (think of it as The Real World by way of the Saw franchise) in a way that - looking back now - feels prescient to an almost radical degree.

Kolobos (from the Greek word for “maimed” or “mutilated”) follows five young adults who answer a cryptic advertisement for “progressive minded individuals” to star in an experimental film. The group includes bubbly extrovert Tina (Promise LaMarco), a template for the sort of fame-craving moths routinely drawn towards the reality TV flame; abrasive comic Tom (Donny Terranova); pretentious actress Erica (Nichole Pelerine), whose main claim to fame is the bottom-of-the-barrel slasher series Slaughterhouse Factor; philosophy student (and film crit windbag) Gary (John Fairlie); and fragile, emotionally troubled artist Kyra (future WWE valet Amy Weber), who couldn’t be less suited to the assignment but signs up anyway for… reasons. Nevertheless, the quintet assemble at a mountain retreat wired from top to bottom with cameras; instruction is minimal, the group’s social dynamics allowed to take shape naturally (the setting itself is largely bereft of personality, though the budget allowed for a pool table at least). Eventually they’re thrown a nasty curveball as steel shutters abruptly seal off the doors and windows without warning and the building reveals itself to be rigged with all manner of fiendish booby traps. There will be blood… or so it would seem.

Up to this point the film is dogged by a certain amateurish quality - the actors’ charm and commitment far outstrip their actual abilities - and yet directors Daniel Liatowitsch and David Todd Ocvirk manage to kindle a faint yet undeniable creative spark… we’re rendered narratively off-balance just enough of a degree that the desire to see what unspools is genuine. Eventually a disfigured, black-gloved killer reveals himself (is he really stalking our leads… or is he simply a product of Kira’s fractured psyche?) and the film treads lightly into the margins of the giallo subgenre (hinted at by a score that evokes Suspiria’s iconic theme rather shamelessly). But Liatowitsch and Ocvirk can only sustain the smoke and mirrors for so long. Eventually their uncertain grasp of the material is laid bare and the story turns to narrative sawdust, collapsing into arbitrary (and worse - dull-edged) incoherence. The more the body count rises, the more the film drains of life.​

Supposedly Liatowitsch and Ocvirk assembled their initial rough cut and were dismayed to discover it barely spanned an hour… which explains the discordant framing device (filmed separately, after-the-fact) in which a bloody and traumatized woman, muttering the word “kolobos” over and over, is found wandering the streets and taken to a hospital. Arrow (bless its heart) does its level best to sell the film as a tragically overlooked and misunderstood gem, but Kolobos promises a lot more than it actually delivers. For a movie that had its finger on the embryonic pulse of reality TV, the dramatic pinball taking place between the personalities of its five leads is distressingly limp (the fact it was filmed on 35mm - as opposed to the more reality-friendly digital video - also suggests a work at stylistic cross-purposes). Torture porn fans will be disappointed; the traps are elementary and brief, the bloodletting basic. But the late-90s was a contradictory era for horror - revitalized by Scream, yet consequently littered with its knockoffs. It’s hardly surprising that The Blair Witch Project - which felt almost four-dimensional with its beclouded lines between fact and fiction that seeped into the nascent internet age - was the film that ignited the cultural conversation and Kolobos is barely remembered as a footnote. Judging by their subsequent credits (or lack thereof), Liatowitsch and Ocvirk might as well have dropped off the face of the earth in the years that followed, but they attempted to zig while everyone else zagged. It didn’t really pay off, but they can at least take comfort in the fact that they were a step ahead of the 21st century zeitgeist.