Stunt casting is always a roll of the dice. Putting too much emphasis on an unexpected performer threatens to overshadow the entirety of a production, especially for a not-particularly-innovative low budget horror film. That said, when I saw that Lou Ferrigno would be sporting an absurd-looking beard in something called The Hermit, I thought, yeah, okay, I’ll give this 86 minutes of my time. And, by and large, I don’t regret that decision.
As a card-carrying member of Generation X, Lou Ferrigno holds a special place in my heart. When I think about the bodybuilder-turned-performer, I’m immediately back in the bedroom of a kid about a year-and-a-half older than me, the son of a family friend. To parents that age difference is nothing, but when you are nine or so, it’s the world. “Go play in Stevie’s room,” they’d say and pick away coffee cake for hours. Then, Stevie, large for his age, would insist we play Incredible Hulk in his room, which mostly meant he'd pick me up and throw me around until I’d get a rug burn.
Over his bed he had a picture torn from a magazine of Ferrigno in full green bodypaint as the drifter Bruce Banner transformed into The Incredible Hulk by gamma rays and PTSD. While I most definitely did not enjoy playing Hulk with Stevie, I certainly understood the fascination with the CBS series of the era, and the image of the enormous green gorilla that hung in his room.
Ferrigno was never able to transmute his enormous, lumbering performing style into A-list status like his Pumping Iron colleague Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he's managed to maintain a decent-enough career. He was a semi-regular on The King of Queens, he’s been on reality shows like Celebrity Apprentice, and he’s pretty ubiquitous at autograph cons. He’s also been an advocate for people with disabilities; getting teased for being hard of hearing is what inspired him to bulk up in his youth. So I was hoping that a horror movie where he plays a cannibal in the woods might throw a log on his fire.
Alas, The Hermit, from Italian director Salvatore Sclafani, isn’t going to spark the Ferrignaissance. The film, told in flashback, is a pretty straightforward Wrong Turn-like ordeal, in which a group of campers run afoul of a beast in the woods who chops people up for meat and sells it as “Hermit Jerky.” There aren’t too many genuinely frightening moments, nor are the kills particularly creative. But there are some joys to be found.
First among them is the lead performance by Malina Weissman, our final girl who retells the story in an investigative TV interview. She’s commanding, she’s got a good scream, she’s sympathetic, and, let’s just be honest here, she spends most of this film in form-fitting jean shorts and a half-shirt. Scalfani is playing by old school horror movie rules here, and it’s a throwback that I did not find disagreeable. Also, though the budget was likely miniscule, all the outdoor shots look terrific. There’s a lot of evocative imagery around the various cabins and out in the woods. Somebody bothered to light this thing.
Then, finally, there’s Ferrigno, looking ridiculous in his mountain man wig and communicating with his dead mother before he makes another sacrifice for meat. There’s no shortage of monosyllabic grunting which, I must confess, I found amusing. No one will ever confuse Lou Ferrigno with Daniel Day-Lewis, but he certainly has a presence.
Also entertaining are the weapons he uses — humongous, phony looking spears that reminded me of the ones the alien giants hucked at Spock in the Star Trek episode “The Galileo Seven.”
Unfortunately, it’s hard to know to what extent this production is aiming for a cheeseball factor. After a quick prologue (a tube top-wearing Instagram influencer played by the charismatic Isabelle McCalla is the first kill) we see close-up images of The Hermit slicing flesh while Shirley Temple sings “Animal Crackers in My Soup.” Later there’s an ironic love montage to an ’80s synthpop deep cut, “Only You” by the band known as Yaz in the US and Yazoo in the UK.
These choices suggest that there’s some winking going on here, but unfortunately there’s not enough in the screenplay that capitalizes on it. It’s not totally rote — there are some funny side characters here and there, particularly a “tellin’ it like it is” Black woman played by an instantly likeable Debora Marcano — but for every sparkle of innovation there’s a patch of dreary overfamiliarity.
The Hermit, which hits VOD on March 3, will not end up on anyone’s best of the year list, but for Gen Xers who’d like one last camping trip with an old friend, there’s just enough meat on the bone.
