Starring Aaron Poole. Rating unavailable

The Void is like a cosmic cross between the original Hellraiser, John Carpenter’s The Thing, some freaky Lovecraft shit, and that skinless-human Body Worlds exhibition Science World had running a few years back.

But I still didn’t like it that much.

The Sault Ste. Marie–shot horror flick opens with a young man and woman running for their lives from an old house in the woods. The girl dies badly, but a hapless patrolman (Aaron Poole from CBC’s Strange Empire) finds the guy and rushes him to the hospital where the cop’s ex (Kathleen Munroe) and her dad (Kenneth Welsh from The Fog) are on duty. Soon after the place gets surrounded by knife-wielding KKK/coven types in white robes with dark triangles on their hoods.

Canadian screen vet Art Hindle (Black Christmas, The Brood) shows up as a state trooper with ’tude before everything goes totally nuts and the flesh starts flying nonstop. Conveniently located scalpels sever jugulars and a tentacled monster comes to gooey life so it can get repeatedly axed and shotgunned. Then some of the guys head down to the basement, where a portal to hell or to everlasting life or whatever awaits.

Steven Kostanski—who wrote and directed The Void with Jeremy Gillespie—has makeup-FX credits for crappy sequels like Resident Evil: Retribution and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, so it’s no surprise when the barrage of gore and creature effects becomes the sole focus of the show.

But even the most ardent gorehounds will wish the filmmakers had put half as much effort into story, pacing, and dialogue as into the ’80s-style practical effects. Man does not live by gore alone, and if he did he’d take the B.C.–shot Slither any day.