Director/Story/Producer – Philippe Martinez, Screenplay – Sean-Michael Argo, Philippe Martinez & Leigh Scott, Photography – Mike Mahon, Music – Michael Richard Plowman, Visual Effects – Abishek Pendey, Art Direction – Vaughn Anslyn. Production Company – MSR Media SKN.
Alex Pettyfer (Jordan), Eve Mauro (Sarah), Wayne Gordon (Ryan), Jackson Rathbone (Leo), Sadie Newman (Leila), Niki Spiridakos (Laura Hamilton)
A team of mercenaries headed by Ryan are sent to the tiny island of Esperanza to bring back a woman who has gone into hiding there. The team arrive to find the island deserted and nothing left except piles of dust where people were. All but Jordan then experience a strange piercing noise. Afterwards, they begin to see hallucinations of guilts from their past as shadowy creatures emerge to kill them.
Black Noise was the fourteenth film directed by French director-producer Philippe Martinez. Martinez set up base in the US in 1990 and has made mostly action films since his directorial debut in 2003. His one other film I have covered before was The Steam Experiment (2009) where Val Kilmer played a professor who locks a group of people in a sauna to teach them about global warming. In addition, Martinez has produced a reasonable number of films since the 1990s, including the genre likes of Dot.Kill (2005), House of 9 (2005), Attrition (2018), G-Loc (2020), Max Cloud (2020) and York Witch’s Society (2022), that latter of which he also wrote, all being medium-budget films produced for video, dvd and streaming.
Black Noise is an incredibly frustrating film. A group of mercenaries arrive on an island and find everybody present missing, seemingly turned to dust – a great and promising set-up – and then experience a strange noise overhead that causes them to go crazy and begin hallucinating. Mysterious, barely glimpsed creatures appear out of the shadows and attack them. There is not too much explanation about what is going on other than that. Certainly, this kind of wilful enigma can prove fascinating – see the not dissimilar The Block Island Sound (2020).
You spend the entirety of Black Noise following the team’s progression across the island with the expectation that they will arrive at a point where it will all make sense – but it never does. In fact, it is only when you arrive at the end credits that you discover that the creatures that Alex Pettyfer fights right at the end are meant to be aliens – without a read of the credits it would not be possible to tell. The film offers no explanation of what the aliens are doing or what the noise and mass insanity outbreaks are.
The film features Alex Pettyfer who around 2011 was being touted as a major new teen heartthrob/star – only for his career to promptly go nowhere. It feels as though Pettyfer’s star has fallen a long way down to the point he is taking on low-budget material like this. Also on board is Jackson Rathbone, whose name rose as part of the Twilight franchise but has similarly languished doing nothing much. Eve Mauro has been a regular name on action and horror material since the early 2000s.
The film is clearly shot with minimal budget – there is no credit for production design, meaning that everything has been filmed on location. In this case, Philippe Martinez has taken the production to St Kitts and Nevis, a tiny island nation in the West Indies with a population of only 50,000, and shot everything there.
Philippe Martinez does co-write with Leigh Scott, who was involved in the early days of The Asylum and made several of their films with the likes of The Beast of Bray Road (2005), Frankenstein Reborn (2005), King of the Lost World (2005), Dragon (2006), Exorcism: The Possession of Gal Bowers (2006), Hillside Cannibals (2006), Pirates of Treasure Island (2006), The 9/11 Commission Report (2006), The Hitchhiker (2007) and Transmorphers (2007), as well as several for other companies with Dracula’s Curse (2005), Flu Bird Horror (2008), Chrome Angels (2009), The Dunwich Horror (2009), The Witches of Oz (2011), Dorothy and the Witches of Oz (2012), The Lost Girls (2014), Piranha Sharks (2016), The Little Mermaid (2024) and episodes of the anthology The Penny Dreadful Picture Show (2013), while he has also written the screenplays for Wolvesbayne (2009) and Quantum Apocalypse (2010).
Trailer here