Revealer (2022) poster

Revealer (2022)

Rating:


USA. 2022.

Crew

Director – Luke Boyce, Screenplay – Michael Moreci & Tim Seeley, Story – Luke Boyce, Michael Moreci & Tim Seeley, Producers – Aaron B. Koontz, Brett Hays, Sarah Sharp & Robert Patrick Stern, Photography – Robert Patrick Stern, Music – Alex Cuervo, Visual Effects Supervisor – Ryan Urban, Visual Effects – Turncoat Pictures, Asmodeus Design – Brian Zurek, Production Design – Sarah Sharp. Production Company – Shatterglass Films/Paper Street Pictures/Turncoat Pictures/Nextmission.

Cast

Caito Aase (Angie Pittarelli), Shaina Schrooten (Sally Mewbourne), Bishop Stevens (Ray), Buzz Leer (Wallace), Phil Bogdan (Asmodeus)


Plot

Angie Pittarelli heads to work for her shift as a stripper at the Revealers peep show. Outside the building, a Christian group, led by Angle’s old school friend Sally Mewbourne, is staging a protest and trying to shut Revealers down for its immorality. In the midst of Angie’s shift, something happens outside the building. Angie then finds her manager Ray has been turned into a zombie. Next Sally appears, seeking refuge inside the building. Angie tries to get Sally to set her moralising aside and help her escape from the booth she is trapped inside. The two are forced to cooperate to deal with the zombified Ray, parasitic snakes and the appearance of demons, as it would appear that the Biblical Apocalypse is occurring.


I must admit to being hooked by the premise for Revealer – a stripper and a religious fundamentalist are trapped together in a peepshow as the apocalypse occurs. It’s a great elevator pitch of a concept that sells the film to you before it even begins. The film also takes place at a single contained setting – the peepshow facility and in the latter sections the tunnels beneath the building – with a cast of two (and a couple of others that briefly appear in no more than a couple of scenes apiece). The two girls are cast as diametrically opposed personalities that play off each other throughout.

I expected Revealer to be no more than a B-budget film, which it certainly is at least in terms of budget. The surprise is how well it works. The writing of the two characters is extremely solid and the script explores their points of view well. The two actresses are perfectly chosen and give fine performances. The arc the two undergo – from clashing ideological views to BFFS – is predictable from the outset but the writing and the two actresses, Caito Aase and Shaina Schrooten, do a fantastic job in making it work.

It has become expected in the 2020s to have some kind of LGBT representation in the plot or make one of the characters gay. There are many bad examples where this ends up being shoehorned onto the plot – the support group scene in Avengers: Endgame (2019) being a perfect example – and of characters whose gayness is the sole defining feature about them. Revealer does have one such twist later in the film but the surprise is, for something that feels like another example of shoehorning a topical issue into a film, it actually works extremely well as a surprise character reveal.

Sally Mewbourne (Shaina Schrooten) and Angie Pittarelli (Caito Aase) in Revealer (2022)
(l to r) Fundamentalist Sally Mewbourne (Shaina Schrooten) and stripper Angie Pittarelli (Caito Aase) forced to cooperate during the Apocalypse

The film becomes a little preachy towards the end in some of its message about being true to one’s self and against hypocrisy and society’s moralists. But it does work undeniably well. You also end up wanting to see a little more of the apocalypse. We get assorted zombies, parasitic snakes and a full demon, as well as an end credits shot that pulls back through the burning city, but you wish we had seen or been told more about what was going on.

Revealer was a feature-length directorial debut for Luke Boyce who had made short films going back to the early 2000s. The film is produced by Aaron B. Koontz who also directed the horror films Camera Obscura (2017) and The Pale Door (2020). The script comes from Tim Seeley, a comic-book writer and artist on the popular Hack/Slash series and assorted DC titles.


Trailer here


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