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The web series Malice is about Alice (Brittany Martz), who is sixteen. Her dad is a veteran who still has a lot of guns. Her mother’s an alcoholic. When her grandmother dies, they move into her house—and that’s when the trouble really starts.
The house may or may not be haunted, but it is certainly creepy. Alice wants to find out what’s going on, while her sister, Abbey (Rebekkah Johnson), just hopes to blend in at the new school. But then they discover that the house has a reputation. They see strange things, and people start going missing—in particular, their parents.
The story is told in short episodes, which are usually about five minutes long. The total running time is about an hour and a quarter. Phillip J. Cook wrote and directed it on a shoestring budget—meaning only one shoestring. But it comes off well.
True, some of the special effects are basic, but that’s not the focus here. You watch it for the characters, the acting, and the plot. Of these, Brittany Martz gets the best part and the best lines as Alice. The show focuses on her, and she carries it well. She’s believable as a teenager with a great deal of angst, significant concerns, and really good aim with a gun.
Alice is the engine for the plot because it’s her motivations and her actions that reveal new information and take us to the climax. She’s energetic, curious, and socially inept. Seriously, she never blends in to any group, and she never makes any friends of her own. She’s the one who opens the whole series by sitting on a rooftop with a rifle, saying “being a teenager sucks,” and asking how it all came to that.
If you always open a story with a hook, a question, or a paradox, the story will work out. Since these are short episodes, the pattern is to start with a query and end with a different query. It’s built around cliffhangers, and it forces you to try to see how one more thing will be solved. It’s a little like computer gameplay: one more minute, one more turn.
No one in this story is all good or all bad, and though people become better, they do not become perfected in that “happily ever after” way. It’s a more mature way of seeing the world, and it’s well written and well presented. I recommend it. And as the company has other films available, I will review them later.
