THE EMPTY MAN (2020) * ½

A mountain climber in Bhutan falls into a cavern where he is possessed by a spirit that erupts from an ugly skeletal altar.  His buddies rescue him and bring him to an abandoned cabin and… it doesn’t end well.  Flashforward a few years.  An ex-cop (James Badge Dale) is looking into the mysterious suicide of a family friend.  Could her death and the reaper-like specter be connected?

The pre-title sequence clocks in at a whopping twenty minutes and probably could’ve been its own effective, self-contained short film as it plays like a marriage between The Thing and Evil Dead.  From there, the movie turns into a mash-up of Candyman and The Ring with a group of teens blowing into a bottle and calling upon the titular ghost before dying an untimely death three days later.  This section of the flick is a bit of a comedown from the opening, but it isn’t bad.  

Unfortunately, once Dale becomes the sole focus, things go in the toilet PDQ.  This section of the film is slow moving, meandering, confusing, and dull.  It also takes up the bulk of the running time, which is a whopping one-hundred-and-thirty-seven minutes, which is not the optimal length for something like this.  Heck, this would’ve probably still been a mess at eighty-seven minutes, but at the very least, it would’ve been fifty fucking minutes shorter.

Dale is not a bad actor, but he is given zilch to work with here.  The rest of the cast are bland and unmemorable too.  Heck, you know you’re in trouble when your movie features Stephen Root as an aloof cult leader and he barely even registers.  

The Empty Man (which was based on a comic book I’ve never heard of) was directed by David Prior, who as far as I can tell is NOT David A. Prior, who made Sledge Hammer.  As bad as Sledge Hammer was, it was certainly better than this crap.  You know a movie is bad when you start wishing David A. Prior had directed it.  

I can’t completely write it off because the first half-hour or so works.  The problem is after that, you’re still left with almost two hours’ worth of crap to sit through.