"INVOKING YELL" (2023) Harkens Back To 90s Black Metal And Warns That Fame Comes With A Price (REVIEW)
Welcome Villain Films
Metal and Horror have always gone hand and hand but with Welcome Villain Films’ latest release, “INVOKING YELL”, we learn the horrors of just how evil songs and people can be. Check out our review below.
HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR COFFEE? LIKE MY METAL, BLACK!
The 90s were a turbulent time for extreme metal fans. Death Metal was popping up a little more with bands like DEATH from Florida and Cannibal Corpse paving the way for many newer groups and Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax coming in with Thrash Metal. That’s not even mentioning all the bands from around the world vying for attention. There was a lot of metal to choose from. Death metal incorporates extreme lyrics around breakneck blast beats and breakdowns, however, this was not enough for many. They wanted darker, heavier, more sinister music. This new genre also had a major change from Death Metal, Satan, was the key focus of what we now call “Black Metal”.
As the extreme monarch for defiance and evil incarnate, Satan made a perfect protagonist for Black Metal. Let’s face it, Lucifer, Satan, The Devil, whatever ya wanna call him, intrigues many with the darkness that surrounds us all and just how evil mankind can be. It also focused on Satan being wronged by God and God being the evil one. This is what Black Metal thrived on, it didn’t care about fan exposure or people even liking the music, it meant more than just those simplistic desires. It got to the point that Norwegian Black Metal bands were doing so much for clout, that church burning became to be of the norm. You can read about them and this period extensively in the book “Lords of Chaos” by Michael Moynihan, and Didrik Soderlind. We won’t get into the book itself but it is safe to say, it’s brutal, real, and most importantly, Satanic.
Tape trading was a way to get this type of music out to different parts of the world. Many metal bands in the late 80s and early 90s used tape trading to get their demos out to prospective record labels as well as getting more fans from around the country and the world. Demo tapes were huge; before streaming like Spotify and Apple Music or YouTube, it was the only way to learn about new music, especially Black Metal.
This is where Invoking Yell comes into play.
SYNOPSIS:
Set in 1997 in the south of Chile, INVOKING YELL is a love letter to black metal that follows a trio of metalhead twenty-something girls who venture into the woods to shoot the demo tape for their black metal band, Invoking Yell. However, things take a sinister turn as they document their disturbing and unorthodox process of recording paranormal phenomena to be used in the album’s final track.
Directed by Patricio Valladares, Invoking Yell starts standard for a shakey cam / found footage flick. Many wilderness shots of the Chilean forests and establishing shots put the viewer in the car with the ladies of Invoking Yell. Andrea (María Jesús Marcone) and Tania (Macarena Carrere) are the main members of the band and they have brought along Ruth (Andrea Ozuljevich) to help film their attempt at recording some “spirits” that are supposedly haunting a remote cabin area. This is all well and good for the film's opening act, but you can see that much of the movie uses these shots throughout to disorient the viewer. To us, it was a bit too much and some of these shots could have been scrapped for more gore and shock value later on in the film.
Right from the first act, we learn that Andrea is a bit…off from the other girls. She is downright mean and has a “fuck you” attitude about everything and everyone. We dig her for sure. Tania and Ruth seem to be a bit more pensive and hesitant about what Andrea has planned. When they arrive at an abandoned camp, Andrea reveals that the site was where a busload of children died and their spirits remained. Of course, the potential for gathering EVP readings from the forest and adding it to a black metal demo tape would be rad but there’s something far more sinister at play here.
As the girls continue to go deeper into the forest and talk about their influences, paranormal experiences, and issues with the Chilean black metal scene, Andrea breaks out the recording equipment, and Tania and Ruth start getting high off some liquid acid or some sort of hallucinogenic. We’re not too sure why this was needed as the girls also get drunk and start making out with each other. This is where the film lost us as it didn’t need to portray the women in this manner and could have kept things a bit dark and bleak but it is a ray of levity for the viewer.
Add some metal music to the ladies dancing and making out, plus some pretty damn impressive “corpse paint” on their faces, and you have a recipe for something bad happening to poor Ruth. You see, during the whole first and second act, Andrea makes it very apparent that “You’re not in the band, Ruth” and is downright mean to her all along the way. Ruth was never either of the other girl’s friends, she was meant to be a sacrifice. How else would Andrea and Tania invoke the spirits around them? See what the director did there? Invoking Yell needed to invoke some spirits to get their music heard and every good occult practitioner knows, that human sacrifice is the ticket that needs to be punched for some evil doing and your band to make it big.
We’ve seen real-life torture and the scene that follows involving Ruth and the girls is downright terrifying. You know those warnings you read on plastic bags? The one that says to keep away from children due to potential suffocation risks? Let’s just say that Ruth finds out the hard way why these warnings are there.
The remaining third act is just Ruth running for her life while Andrea and Tania hunt her down. Her screams of agony and pain will make a great last track on Invoking Yell’s demo. Unfocused shakey cam footage abounds as Andrea calls for Ruth to come back. She even calls her a “bible thumper” for running away. Tania finds Ruth first and gets what’s coming to her by falling down the side of a cliff onto a jagged rock. This is probably the only real gory scene in the entire film.
While this is happening, Andrea gets possessed by the spirits in the forest. This is where the director could have turned things up to ten and shown Andrea being taken over by these demonic and agitated entities but all we get is her wiggling on the ground for a little while shaking. Ruth gets away and then, in our opinion, makes the dumbest mistake in her life and goes back to the same location a few weeks later to see if anyone is there. Of course, she runs into Andrea walking around like a zombie and the final scene of the film is the only scare in the whole movie.
“Invoking Yell” is not going to be for everyone. The film is very much a slow burn that builds to a plateau instead of a crescendo. While the locations and cinematography at times make you wonder in amazement how the production team got the shots they did, the story, albeit decent, could really be turned up a notch with a bigger budget. The actresses portraying Andrea and Tania truly nailed their performances and made you believe they cared about the band and being known in the “black metal” community. It amazes me how the actress who played Ruth kept her cool during the “plastic bag” scene as that would have had us tripping out and screaming our heads off, even if it was just for a movie. We wish the film discussed or even showed flashbacks of other metal bands like Mayhem or Burzum murdering for clout like the girls in the film wanted to.
With a bigger budget, better-set pieces, and an overall killer soundtrack, “Invoking Yell” could be a tour de force that would blow everyone away. Indie films run on a shoestring budget sometimes and can not have everything they need to grip an audience. We did however like the artwork for the band itself and their desire to use EVP in their demo recordings. We have never heard of that but it makes sense for a black metal band to do. Hell, we might just try to do that on our next musical endeavor…minus the sacrifices of invocations of course.
INVOKING YELL is set to release across digital platforms tomorrow, September 20th. Massacre Video will be handling the physical release of the film with a limited-edition Blu-ray packed full of special features. You can find out more and how to order the film at www.massacrevideo.com.
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