THE MAN IN THE WHITE VAN
**
Directed by Warren Skeels.
Starring Madison Wolfe, Bret Bassinger, Ali Larter, Sean Astin, Gavin Warren, Noah Lomax, Skai Jackson.
Horror, US, 105 Minutes, Certificate 15, 105 mins
Released On Digital, Blu-ray and DVD in the UK by Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment on 29th September
Memorably parodied as long ago as the Coen brothers’ FARGO, the “Based on true events” opening disclaimer on a horror film had also already become a groan-inducing cliché in the early 2000s. The recurring, usually dubious claims of authenticity were a response to both faux found footage movies post-THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and the spurious links to the Ed Gein case inherent in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2003). More recently, the embarrassingly sincere THE CONJURING: LAST RITES, when not tripping over itself to celebrate how the Warrens definitely weren’t a pair of opportunistic charlatans, constantly felt the need to remind us that “Hey this really happened! Even that ridiculously lame jump scare a few minutes ago!”
THE MAN IN THE WHITE VAN opens with “Based on true events in Florida”, perhaps because a more honest sentence like “Very loosely based on, and shamelessly exploitative of, a series of murders in Florida in roughly the same time period” would be too unwieldy. The claim is thanks to Billy Mansfield Jr., a rapist, paedophile and murderer who killed five women between 1975 and 1980 (the film is mostly set in 1975), burying four of them at his family home and murdering the fifth in California. Warren Skeels’ pedestrian picture, co-written with Sharon Y. Cobb, pointlessly hops back in time from its main story to show the eponymous vehicle stalking, abducting and (discreetly) assaulting young women from 1970 onward. Mostly, it’s an extended homage to John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978) and the stalk-and-slash movies that both preceded and followed its huge commercial success. It could have effectively been set in any location or time period, and the colour of the van is irrelevant.
The mid-seventies backdrop means lots of close-ups of turntables playing records like The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You”, contemporary fashions and interior design. Madison Wolfe, who effectively portrayed the “possessed” adolescent in THE CONJURING 2 and made a brief appearance in LAST RITES, is very good as Annie, a tomboy, horse-riding teenager who mentions Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Allman Brothers in her nightly prayers and spins yarns about being attacked by rattlesnakes at the dinner table. Brec Bassinger is likeable as her boy-fixated, more girlie older sister Margaret, Ali Larter is stuck with a one-note, unflattering, strict “Mom” role, bandying about square phrases like “young lady” and “Sunday best”, while Sean Astin is wasted as their ineffectual Dad. Said white van man prowls around the neighbourhood, as Annie struggles to convince any of the stupidly oblivious adults of the looming threat in silly exchanges like: “He was here! The man in the white van!” / “You mean the repair man?”
Wolfe’s appealing performance belongs in a better movie. The worst element of THE MAN IN THE WHITE VAN is its insulting series of LOUD, cliched false scares, you know the kind: Scott Borland’s score works itself into a frenzy preparing us for something really terrifying – only to reveal… Oh! It's just Dad returning home from work! In the absence of any real suspense, the soundtrack batters us into submission as it accompanies hackneyed hand-on-shoulder-style shocks that were old hat by 1980 and appear pitched at people who’ve never seen a horror movie before.
Even without this irritation, this is a paint-by-genre-numbers exercise beneath the period trappings. The extended Halloween night home invasion climax is proficiently done, but nothing we’ve not seen handled better elsewhere, while the script falls into the modern trap of not knowing when to quit. A series of false endings continuing into the end credits (blame Marvel for this trend) provides the biggest terror of all: What if this film never actually ends?
Steven West