Crawford Road
This is the third film of Gordon Price’s I’ve seen, and indeed, the production values still come down on the low side, but that’s not a bad thing; case in point, it makes his films stand out as peculiar, compelling and creepy, in their own way. This is probably the most ambitious of his films, and the weirdest; he has an interesting voice when it comes to genre filmmaking, and I don’t know if I’d say “Crawford Road” is his best one to date, but it’s one that, I would hope, makes people take notice of the talent in front of them.
“Crawford Road,” which was co-directed by James Person, is inspired by the legends of death and murder that surround a bridge in Virginia where, allegedly, a bride hung herself. Price and Person’s story uses a “murder group” meeting- which is to say, people fascinated by stories of murder- to frame their story, which starts in 1862, with a young bride being sold to a person who hunts runaway slaves for a living. We see him hunting one such slave, and then it turns out his new wife may have had a connection with that slave. The legend begins there, and a detective then tells the group about a series of crimes in the 1980s around the same location that have never been satisfactorily solved, although they revolve around a criminal named Vlad (played by Price, who also played the slave hunter).
By having the murder group meeting as a framing device, Price and Person turn “Crawford Road” into less of a straightforward narrative and basically an anthology set around the legend of Crawford Road, and I love this structure for the film. Most of it centers of the crimes of the ’80s, and Vlad, in particular, so the film’s “anthology” feel isn’t done in the same way we would look at “Creepshow,” for example, but it’s an entertaining way to bring this film into focus. The low production values make for some creative choices with visuals and music that, on the surface, seem cheesy, but are actually quite interesting for a film that is, essentially, a folk tale. The way ghosts are seen, the musical themes, give the film an atmosphere that only comes from having a small budget to work with. The stories themselves only carry you so far when they have little in the way of strong characters to follow; the rest is how you tell the story, and Price has a strong vision for how to do that here.
