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THE 100 CANDLES GAME: THE LAST POSESSION (2023)
3 stars
101 Films. Digital. 13th January
The film has an interesting opening with a woman-cum-witch chained up in some kind of dank prison. Eating bugs she coughs up something and concocts a mixture. A book of spells emerges from the wall and contains a small bag of who knows what, which is added to the bowl. There is lots of noise on the soundtrack. She/it floats revealing one cloven foot and one normal… and attempts to escape from captivity. We have no real clue what is going on. Still, let’s ignore all that and cut to our main characters – a bunch of vloggers and the like.
It appears that the creature took refuge in the forest they are walking through and was never seen again. This is just one of the stories that took place there. We have a trio – a guy and two girls – who plan to spend the night at the Stonewall Mansion, supposedly one of the most chilling places in the world. Cheryl (Justina Cebsllos), Amber (Josefina Fariña) and Dylan (Nacho Francavilla). They immediately establish that they are annoying. They are joined later by Koji (Zhon Li).
Inside the house they have setup candles in the pattern of a pentagram. They are going to tell horror stories and after each one the teller must extinguish one of the candles in front of a mirror. That’s the rules of the game and we are in anthology territory as each takes it in turn to tell tall tales – and so we race through several short, and to the point, stories. The film is only seventy odd minutes long and some ten of those were used up with the prologue. So there is little room for expansive narratives.
So you get a Babysitter and a little girl playing with one of those paper fortune telling folded up thingies, where odd things start to happen. Next is the tale of Lady Fairfax, the Duchess of Stonewall Mansion. She is obsessed with her maid Clementine but she the loves the stable boy. Probably not going to end well. A man locked in a room alone. Gun to his head. Zombies at his door. He is injured, possibly bitten. He has five minutes before he might ‘turn’. In a hotel. On her wedding night, Sonya, is locked in the bathroom having a panic attack. The phone keeps ringing. Her husband answers it – ‘Let her go, David’, says a voice on the other end… A woman in her living room lighting candles. Preparing a ritual. She is alone. She tapes a picture of her father on the door. What is she trying to do? Contact the dead…? A woman returning home phones her babysitter when her phone dies. In an underpass she hears a young girl crying, lost. Then the youngster disappears and the woman finds herself somehow trapped in the tunnel.
Like all portmanteau the stories are variable and don’t have time to establish characters or anything else, but are just a vehicle for some kind of twist. None of the vignettes here are particularly memorable, though the filmmakers clearly have faith as the ending infers a possible further sequel (as I assume this production is a follow-up to the 2020 release THE 100 CANDLES GAME).
The main film was directed by Guillermo Lockhart and Charly Goitia with sequences by the following – Jeronimo Rocha, David Ferino, Maximilian Niemann, Arie Socorro, Andres Borghi and Ryan Graff. None of the sequences exhibit anything that stands out as notable.
Steve Kirkham
