Anything for Jackson (2020)

(On Cable TV, October 2020) Low-budget Canadian Horror is often a hard sell, but there’s enough going on in Anything for Jackson to rival higher-profile filmmaking. The premise does play with genre expectations a bit, as it features elderly villains trying to resurrect their dead grandson through a reverse exorcism. To do so, they kidnap a pregnant woman in order to put the soul of their grandson (the titular Jackson) into her soon-to-be-born child, but, being silly Satanists, they get it wrong and, well, what happens next is the third act of the film. For a prototypical suburban horror film shot in the screenwriter’s own house, there’s quite a lot of imagination and genre savvy on display here. It certainly helps to have the memorably lugubrious Julian Richings as a co-lead. Otherwise, the digital cinematography is crisp, the acting is decent and there’s enough plot in the narrative tank to get us coasting to the end despite a third act that doesn’t quite come up to the expectations left by the earlier sections of the film. Nonetheless, Anything for Jackson is pretty good, and not only by Canadian-horror standards.