Review: ‘Ever After’ is a demented fairytale slasher for horror diehards

In 1998, audiences fell in love with Drew Barrymore’s romantic take on Cinderella in Ever After. Nearly 30 years later, we get a different take on the Cinderella myth under the same name, along with assorted other fairy tales, thanks to Hungarian horror director László Illés. Except this time around Prince Charming is an inbred weirdo with a foot fetish who lives in the woods with his mom and will murder you if your foot doesn’t fit the magic slipper. 

Ever After is your typical lower-budget, direct-to-video-style slasher with a variety of issues (awkward dialogue and pacing are two of the biggest) and a couple of major points in its favor that may make it stick out for horror fans. The most prominent of which is a cast full of horror icons like Kane Hodder (Jason Voorhees, Hatchet), Bonnie Aarons (The Nun in The Conjuring movies), Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes), and Mark Shepppard (Supernatural, Battlestar Galactica). Their involvement ranges from quick cameos to roles more integral to the legitimately bonkers plot. 

A group of women without recognizable differentiating characteristics are renting a house in the woods for a bachelorette party for the couple Amy (Maria de Sá) and Helen (Lara Sas). The party gets off to a weird start when “Prince Charming” (Philippe Reinhardt nailing the creep factor) shows up looking straight out of Beauty and the Beast, but really goes off the rails when a trio of men in pig masks tries to blow down their rental with a flamethrower. 

What starts as a typical slasher quickly gets unpredictable when the women are forced into the woods, finding a gun-toting Little Red Riding Hood and Big Bad Wolf (Kane Hodder). The fun in Ever After comes from never knowing what demented fairytale rendering will pop up next. The three “little” pigs are a constant threat for the ever-dwindling bachelorette party, and then the next second there will be fantastic nonsense like a hallucinogenic cave with a frog voiced by Malcom McDowell or Bonnie Aarons as a wonderfully hammy witch living in a trailer in the woods. 

Though bursting with creativity and a cast of horror icons who know exactly what they’re there to do, the film is full of issues. Illés and his fellow Hungarian co-writer László Krisztián Gera could have used an English script editor, as every line of dialogue is slightly wrong. It doesn’t help either that the film uses a multinational cast who then have to chew through unnatural writing as best they can. Actress Lydia Pearl Pentz, who plays a member of the bachelorette party, deserves a special mention for delivering some really odd lines like “I will beat you to death without shame” with a fervor that makes it seem like her role has actual character traits.  

Pacing is also an issue with an unnecessarily long runtime that stretches just over two hours. What starts as a wild, frantic first hour gets slower and slower through a succession of more dialogue-heavy encounters that get longer and longer in the second part. When we get to a bread-and-circuses-themed final encounter with Mark Sheppard speaking entirely in rhyme, it’ll feel endless unless you’re not a big fan of his. If this had been cut down to a tight 90 minutes, it’d be a madcap midnight movie “masterpiece.”

Ever After is for horror diehards only, the type of people that can watch their hundredth no-budget slasher trash and still have a good time because it had one particularly gnarly kill. The kind of people who are going to have a blast seeing Kane Hodder pop up for a couple of minutes and enjoy the type of delirium that can only come from a movie without a lot of polish. For everyone else, you’re good to skip this one.