Horror Review: Cruel Peter (2019)

Cruel Peter (2019) sees a psychotic brat who has fun torturing animals and cutting people up in 1908 Sicily get his comeuppance when a local boy, Alfredo, whose dog he buried alive, does the same thing to him. Alfredo even made a wooden tombstone with a little creepy nursery rhyme-style epitaph. Aww, that will surely break the heart of Peter's enabling, veiled mother.

Skip to present day London (I think), where a widowed archaeologist, Prof Norman Nash, is given a light assignment by his boss to get him back in the game after we lost it following his wife’s death. This light assignment? To lead the excavation of a historical Sicilian cemetery, which so happens to be in the vicinity of Peter's now abandoned house. That can't be good. What's even worse is that Nash's daughter Liz has been trying to contact her dead mother with what the movie calls a Bishop's Ball. I googled this but it's not a real thing. It's basically a crystal ball with cuts on its surface that gets illuminated and then spun so that the shadows of those cuts can form words on the wall. Though it doesn’t look like it would be able to provide detailed answers, it's certainly more visually interesting than the usual Ouija boards. While his daughter spins her ball, Nash finds Peter's wooden tombstone and a box with his torture tools, which he refers to as "toys" for a dead child. Peter's corpse isn't there because for some reason, Alfredo kept it in a separate location. Hmm, why? Wouldn't the tombstone draw attention to himself if the little hell spawn's mother found it?

Luckily for Nash, the local archaeologist he's working with, Bianca, has a superstitious aunt, Emma, who gives him a charm to ward off evil ghosts. This will come in handy when Liz gets inevitably possessed by Peter and the little monster returns to his old habits of... frying crispy bacon? Because that's the first thing possessed Liz does. She also argues with her father and... gasp, swears! The horror! Oh, and she runs and laughs with Harriet, an English woman she found in the woods. By the way, did I mention that Peter's mother never showed her face? After a little googling, Nash finds out Peter went missing and that shockingly this wasn't followed by his mother tearing the whole island apart looking for the little creep. We also learn that Peter's father killed himself by slitting his own throat. I'm sure the fact that his psycho son always carried a switchblade knife is just a funny coincidence.

Up until the possession there are some mild, unoriginal muddy corpse Peter sightings, the predictable moment when the shadow cuts on the ball form "yes" and "mum" in response to the questions "Is anyone there?" and "Who are you?", a dead woman's ghost trying to warn them, and a jump scare in a very dirty bathroom I thought had to be a dream but turned out to be an actual bathroom at Liz's school. Really, that thing looked dreadful. There's also an uncooperative police officer, who keeps telling Nash to forget about the child grave, the missing kid, and the "toys" that at one point get stolen. This movie is just boring and not really scary.

Thanks to a suddenly appearing photograph of Peter's abandoned house, Nash meets Alfredo's nephew who helpfully tells him that Peter killed his own father (how shocking), his mother killed the housekeeper (the dead woman Nash has been seeing) to perform a ritual, and that his uncle died in the earthquake trying to unbury Peter. Alfredo was also the only one who knew where he was buried. This will pose an easily surpassed inconvenience when we get to the whole Body Must Be Found To Stop The Spirit bit.

Possessed Liz does absolutely nothing. The charm Bianca's aunt gave her father makes her back away once, but he doesn't wear it, so there's no reason for her not to attack him. If Peter can make vegan Liz eat meat, he should be able to make her stab her meddling father. We saw him burn a mouse alive, FFS. Possessed Liz finally does something bad after being invited to Aunt Emma's house and the old woman notices the black magic markings on her back. When Bianca goes to see what her aunt and her guest are doing in the kitchen, she finds her aunt lying on the floor and Liz picks her up by the neck with her ghost super strength! Wait, she can do that?! Bianca is choking and... oh, Aunt Emma is still alive and knocks out Liz with another one of those charms. WTF? How is Aunt Emma not dead? Why wouldn't Peter kill her? He buried a dog alive and went around nailing birds to trees! When Nash arrives, the women are purifying Liz's spirit, but he freaks out, interrupts the process, and takes his daughter home.

Possessed Liz runs away to Peter's mother. Nash follows but she uses a voodoo doll to push him away in a non-lethal way. Because for some reason, the woman who slit her housekeeper's throat has become nicer with age. Nash goes back to Bianca and her aunt and is told the only way to save Liz is to find Peter's corpse and exorcise it. So, he uses the ball and Alfredo's spirit shows it to him. Turns out Peter is in the church's catacombs. Before Nash and Bianca leave, the dead psycho's mother shows up at Aunt Emma's place and of course she's Harriet. It seems that in addition to being a witch, she's also a vampire because Emma says she can't get in the house unless she's invited. She can't walk over consecrated ground either, so the cemetery is off-limits for her, too. After her niece and Nash leave, however, Aunt Emma invites Harriet in, presumably to buy them some time. I regret to inform you that there's no witchy battle - Harriet just slits Aunt Emma's throat. When Nash and Bianca arrive at the cemetery, Giuseppe, the caretaker (I think), is dead because Peter's mother has no compunction about murdering tertiary characters.

So, they find the corpse and while Bianca is doing the exorcism, Harriet is performing a ritual on Liz, probably to bind her son's spirit to her forever. Bianca and Nash are attacked by goo, mud zombies, and finally a burned Peter (why is he burned?), but they manage to prevail. Nash gets Liz, and for some stupid reason doesn't GTFO of Sicily and that cemetery. Two months later, the same cop shows up and tells him how dumb that was. Turns out you can't kill the dead and now Luz and Peter are connected. After the cop disappears, Nash sees a bust of him with a date of death in 1930. That explains why he was so vague. Ghosts are the worst. Cut to Liz on a school trip to a museum filled with dead animals. First, she begins hearing Peter's voice, though she's deaf. Then, she finds herself underground, buried in mud. Finally, she's back at the Norman Bates museum, spitting mud and a bug. She looks weird and you can hear the tune from Peter's nursery rhyme-style epitaph. Oh, no! She's possessed! This means she's going to start making crispy bacon and swearing again!

Cruel Peter had everything to be a scary movie: a scary premise, a scary spirit, a scary atmosphere. However, it wasted every single one of those elements. Seriously, why isn't this scary? Why? Yes, it has a very predictable story, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have been good. What was the point of having all that build-up with Peter's awfulness and then do nothing when he possessed Liz? Were we supposed to believe Harriet bonded with Nash so much that she left him alive to thwart her plans? Even the Ringu-like ending where we find out that the usual spirit-appeasing stuff didn't work was just meh. Verdict: dull, bland, and non-scary.

By Danforth