Sometimes these media screenings are funny: Hey let’s go see ‘Fright Night’ an adult rated gory horror movie at 8am in the morning on a weekday? It’s kind of hard to get into that required mood when it’s real early and you’re on a bus before the sun has even risen. But you know; it became evident pretty quickly that ‘Fright Night’ wasn’t exactly a horror movie – it has horror elements sure, but at its heart it’s a dark comedy. A very funny, gory entertaining 90’s esque film – and I loved it! Read more…
All posts tagged horror
‘SCREAM 4′ Tag Team Movie Review: This is top ten 2011 right here; an incredible sequel. Well Worth The Wait.
DAVE:
So we just walked out of ‘Scream 4’ and it was amazing. Watching the new movie it is easy to forget that it’s been ten years since the last film – the maligned; but enjoyable ‘Scream 3’- and that Wes Craven hasn’t directed a decent film since then. Craven; renowned for ‘Nightmare On Elm Street’; ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and of course the original ‘Scream’ films has been sitting in Hollywood hell for a while directing crap like ‘Cursed’ – it seemed that his return to the ‘Scream’ franchise was nothing but a quick/cheap grab at a cash in – i.e.. doing the safe film to sustain his career.
The state of Craven isn’t the only thing: there’s the state of producers: The Weinstein brothers (see my article on the franchise itself at…for more) who are trying to get out dire straits…it all seemed desperate. Also worth considering is that they got is a large cast filled with the ‘whose who’ of todays stars: Hayden Panettiere; Emma Roberts; Adam Brody to accompany returning cast Neve Campbell; David Arquette and Courtney Cox…all this seemed much considering the ten year gap since the franchise was last going.
THE RETURN TO WOODSBORO: A retrospective of the ‘Scream’ franchise.
A retrospective of the ‘Scream’ franchise in preparation of this years highly anticipated: ‘Scream 4’. Releases April 15th 2011. Director: Wes Craven. Writer: Kevin Williamson.
By David.
2011: It’s the year with the most sequels/remakes ever. Yes. I believe it even has the Guinness World Record; with something like twenty-six films being released that aren’t original properties. From ‘Transformers 3’ to another ‘Fast And The Furious’ film. That isn’t to say we aren’t getting some sequels that don’t look awesome. There’s ‘The Hangover: Part 2’, the final ‘Harry Potter’, another ‘Pirates’ flick. From the director of ‘Kick Ass’ comes another installment in the ‘X-Men’ franchise. And now a full ten years after the last one; we’re getting a new ‘Scream’…
In ‘Scream 4’ the iconic ‘Ghostface Killer returns for some more crazy satirical horror in April. After ten years since the last time, it might be a good idea to play some catch up on the franchise. Wes Craven; the dude who brought us the classics ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and ‘Nightmare On Elm Street’; directed the first ‘Scream’ in 1996 – A movie that took Horror/slasher conventions and flipped them on their ass. That flick famously advertised (Mega famous- at the time) Drew Barrymoore as the main star; and then proceeded to kill her off in the famous “What’s your favorite scary movie?” opening five minutes: in a sequence that still remains one of the most ingenious film openings ever made. Read more…
‘THE ROAD’ movie review: in-depth analysis and book-to-film comparison.
Article by Patrick Cronin.
There is a sentence on the opening page of McCarthy’s The Road that assumes the narrative in three ways:
And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rim-stone pool stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders.
There is the light that is chaliced in the boy’s heart, the dead-white ash landscape, and the dead sightless prospects of post-apocalypse. With a faint future for the coast where they are headed, a man and his boy are almost blind of prospects. McCarthy’s description leads us to think, in this dream of the father, that this ‘creature’ is a lone deer or some other such animal. But the figure of a man is not misplaced if you imagine it, and if you do the image and meaning is more terrifying.
There is another reason for beginning with this passage. Not only does the film walk faithfully close to the novel, but in these three qualities is the essence of film. Monet said light is his medium, Lipton saw the sun and its light as a recurring image in Spielberg, and so it is with all film. Light is all one sees, both in reality and in the cinema. While neither [director John Hillcoat] nor McCarthy ever go so obviously into this philosophical idea, it does not take so much effort to notice that color vibrates against the flat grey palette of the film by the illumination of a flame, which carries conceptual impetus for the narrative. The flame of life, the light and color of life - an adjunct against suicide which is terrifyingly frank in the film - the flame of being alive as a human is the metaphor the boy and his father carry toward the coast of an ash-covered America.
This is the gravity of the narrative – not the heaviness – but the force which pulls one through the story. Without gravity narrative has no direction or purpose and the characters wander aimless and blind. In this [John Hillcoat] is quite restrained. The gravity does not compare to a racy Minority Report or any other arbitrary example of thriller or detective narratives that pulls you desperately toward narrative closure. The Road is no such film. The slow pace, as slow as they walk with their trolley of luggage, compliments the modest goal of reaching the coast. I use ‘modest’ relative to epic. An appropriate illustration of this point is the small candle flame compared to a raging forest fire. With such restraint [director] constructs images as succinctly and yet brutally direct and honest as McCarthy’s prose, a late descendant of Hemingway. The dialogue naturally follows suit. And this is more than mere style. If any narrative is in need of brutally explicit horror it is a post apocalyptic one.
In fact we are so used to apocalyptic stories it seems Hollywood has rarely had the stomach for a true waste land. Nearly all the films of this genre are of the apocalypse itself, which in the end provide some final image of re-growth and hope. Listing such disaster films is pointless. The ending of The Road also needn’t be revealed, except that from the outset we are in a narrative which is completely original compared to the usual scene of popular catastrophe films. The scene is utterly desolate. One is straight away involved in the characters fate when you utter to yourself, already trying to anticipate the story’s direction in its opening shots: “even if our characters are saved, what hope is there for anything beyond that?” Desolation is irreversible. This is a true apocalyptic vision (rather than a mere catastrophic hick up) which makes, perhaps more thanks to McCarthy, for a very original set-up. The death of the world is here to stay.
I Am Legend had no such stomach. Its New York streets are covered in natural overgrowth, with strong free animals leaping through it; this might even be a positive future for some ecologists. And its ending too completes this relatively play-school description of catastrophe. What is left of the human race is barricaded in a Puritan-like society up state. The words ‘new world’ are too tempting to say. Ones prospects for Will Smith’s character had the initial shape of complete loneliness, a kind of grim Cast Away. But, among the film’s worst moments is that when this is ruined by the arrival of other humans.
The Road works against all these elements. The alienation, except for the relationship of father and son which dominates the narrative, is uncompromising. Conversation and trust between fellow wanderers is absolute in hostility. There is no hope of revival in some enclosure up state in which America will be re-born from its Puritan roots. As for the ecologists, this is there nightmare. The earth and its life is but for a fleeting bug propped on a tin can, irreversibly destroyed. Trees, all leafless, gradually collapse. This seems to be the end of all life, not just human.
(If I can break this mood momentarily, there is an exception to this. It comes in the shape of consumer products. Even when all the world and trees are destroyed and the skies are permanently overcast, capitalism steams ahead in the coca cola can and vitamin water! This is obviously unintentional and the products perfectly credible and would not be spotted but for one with specific interests at the front of ones head from something one read that afternoon before seeing the film.)
I Am Legend comes to mind for another reason. Cannibals in The Road are evoked by images one expects in a zombie film. But I would not use the word zombie; the word living-dead certainly enters ones feelings if not as explicit words then as feelings. Such a scene, as the old man breaking in a bolted basement to find it filled with half-eaten naked humans crowded in the basement, shuffling at the sight of him, certainly recalls the tone of horror found in zombie films - or other horrors such as Holocaust footage. But these are not the cannibals. The basement is a kind of chicken-coop or pantry for those who live above in the house.
Again we come to McCarthy’s ambiguous description of an animal-man I began with. This image divides the figures in the film into those who remain human, and those who descend into cannibals. The fact that these cannibals are not possessed by a rampant virus, but mere desperation makes [John Hillcoat’s] vision more completely real and more horrifying.
I have concentrated thus far on these features for a reason, if I may digress for a paragraph. The horror genre is split in two; those supernatural and those natural. Supernatural horror seems to have been the trend for many, many years, and still will be. Maybe it is my atheism that stops me from feeling as acutely the fear in these films than those of the realist horror genre, but such a film as The Shining (which may debatably contain supernatural qualities) remains supreme in my mind for its grip on real emotions. And I enjoy supernatural horror for different reasons. The Road too, of course a lesser film than The Shining, operates in a similar realm of real horror. This element of making real men and women into wretched figures genuinely haunts the mind as you yourself, no different from these wretches, have the same capability in those circumstances to turn like them. Imagine I Am Legend with a real deadly virus such as AIDS instead of the zombie-vampire-transforming one which seems the most common explanation after Resident Evil. In this AIDS-massacred world the isolation would be more realizable, though the place of zombies would be eradicated. Thus the cannibals of The Road pose the same horror of zombies but without their supernatural element.
To move beyond the atmosphere of this film is hard. While the film’s structure is almost lacking, it remains strung up like a loose old fraying rope. This bareness not only fits conceptually, but enables space for the ashy wind and beautiful cinematography to become almost the film itself. The Road, like Barry Lyndon, is about little more than atmosphere, though the narrative is precisely written. To make this point less harsh, if atmosphere were removed the success of this film would drastically reduce. And atmosphere is so well established that it looms constantly from scene to scene, and there is no letting up. This makes the film feel chapter-less, much like the book, and hard to bear.
As for the treatment of a crucial part of the film, of which I’ve said very little, is the relationship of a son to his father. The emotional movement in these characters is, again slight. But it is there. The characters, perhaps again like the structure, have no real arch. But this is hardly a criticism, because it is not an absence of character. There is no typical hostility between them to bring to resolve. A list can be compiled of the features of each. The father is roughly realist. He does not gloss the obvious horrors with romances of hope to his boy. His realism is so extreme he teaches him the how a pistol is put in ones own mouth, pointed upward and fired. This again is foreign terrain for Hollywood. He has no trust of others they meet on the road. This makes for painful scenes: sending an almost-blind old man (of which a close-up shows nothing short of “eyes dead white and sightless”) out alone to die eventually, and to strip a thief of their possessions down to skin, after the thief weeps desperately for forgiveness.
The boy, however, has a more forgiving sense and these scenes play out against the boy’s will. As for the old man, the father at least gives into his son and provides food for a night with them. One may see this in the boy as the essence or part of the fire he is carrying inside him. Thank god the metaphor of fire is not so explicitly communicated. The father’s giving in suggests a change, though his old distrust is aggravated again by the thief. Going on from here, the fire (I want to stay away from clear definition) in the film’s final moments has more to do with bonds than anything else. There is another feature of the father which needs addressing.
Charlize Theron plays the father’s wife, who, after the fall of the apocalyptic axe, tempts suicide and euthanasia of her son for lack of enough bullets. Eventually she leave her husband and son (born in the midst of this horror) abandoning them into the night. Her scenes are satisfying brief and underwritten, though stepping toward sentimental. Had they been more, the film would have broken up too much, and our bearings would split painfully between two periods of time, almost two narratives. Instead, these scenes feel like what they are, memory. The forgetting of the past, the mind’s dwelling on the dead, are poisons for suicide. Nonetheless there is some sense of memory contained in the fire. Papa tells his son at the most climatic point that his heart is inside his son. This is union and legacy at its purest.
McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men ends with Ed Tom’s dream of his father evoking the fire (of tradition?) that needs to be lit in the dark future.
I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. I was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothing. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the colour of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And I woke up.
It isn’t hard to see this dark and cold future as The Road.
Written by Patrick Cronin.
Teaser Poster for Kevin Smith’s RED STATE!
Here at Damn Good Cup we eagerly await Kevin Smith’s Psychological Horror/ Return to independent roots: ‘RED STATE’. For more on the film and Smith check out our ‘Related Posts’ section at the bottom of the page.
Here is an excerpt from Smith talking about ‘Red State’ from the stage of the Sydney Opera House earlier this year:
“When I started writing that (Red State) the wife was like; “hey man, why the fu*k are you doing another fu*king religious picture? They are just going to get pissed off at us again; throw bricks through our window like they did on Dogma.” And she was like; “you can’t, you just can’t, stop dealing with religion”…
…I mean, the thing is our villain… Our villain’s name is Aven cooper… and his family, and it’s kind of our very own fringe- extremist and conservative church if you will. And it’s a stepping point for what the whole movie is kind of about: What happens when conservatism goes to a ridiculous degree, or something like that: where people take judgement into their own hands or something like that. So um, it is not entirely different [to Phelps], but at the same time my wife and family are concerned because they can kind of see [Phelps] in it… but I really just wanted to use it as a jumping-off point more or less…
…I don’t know, it just got to me. I saw it as some big problem which got me to writing Red State. It is the meanest, nastiest thing I have ever written in my life. I mean there are a couple of titters in it ,or something like that, but it is just dark and mean and ugly, and nobody…there is not even a like-able character in the bunch…and nobody wins. So it’s kind of like a commentary on America I guess: A little snapshot of this tiny corner of america, that if we are not careful about will infect the entire land, so that’s kind of what I want to do, I wanted to go after it and I needed a guy to play Aven Cooper, who is the main bad guy, the reverend if you will, and I wrote the role of Aven Cooper for a guy named Michael Parks”…
I transcribed the entire ‘Red State’ discussion from the Sydney Opera House, and you can check it out here:
http://damngoodcup.com/kevinsmithfredphelpsredstate
Well anyway, here is the beautiful and creepy Poster, which I believe Smith posted himself on his Twitter account:
‘THE LOVED ONES’ movie review: Misogyny as entertainment?
UPDATE: I have made a couple of errors in the review. I attributed the song ‘Not Pretty Enough’ to Missy Higgins instead of Kasey Chambers; based on the comments I have been receiving over this, can I just make it clear that I have no problems with the song, only how it was used. I also said that Brent listens to Metal Music, apparently this is specifically called Hardcore/Metal. Apologies to anybody I offended. I don’t claim to know music – this is a movie site after all! Enjoy the review, it is a bit harsh this one!
‘The Loved Ones’ is a new Australian film which will be released on November 4th. Critics have been calling it both: the dating movie of the year and the horror movie of the year.
How wrong they are…
In general I try hard not to be the person who gets their expectations up on a movie based on the hype or a great trailer; but since ‘The Loved Ones’ was a movie that I looked forward to I can’t help but feel polarized now that I’ve seen it. I love genre flicks – especially horror – and Australia almost never makes them – and when we do i.e ‘Wolf Creek’ they come out great and better than others. Like Leigh Whannel and James Wan with ‘Saw’ and Greg Maclean with ‘Wolf Creek’…We can come up with great original ideas and execute them brilliantly. We can bring the new, and its that freshness that is the difference in what makes a good horror flick as opposed to the tired and formulaic American trash like the recent ‘Nightmare On Elm Street’ and ‘Friday The 13th’ remakes. If all you ever do is rip off prior existing movies and go full steam ahead; charged solely on cliches and cheap manipulation tricks all you end up with is movies like ‘The Loved Ones.’
Because of marketing tricks that are just as cheap and manipulative as the filmic techniques used in the final movie – the film you end up seeing is nothing like the advertised. The storyline concerns itself with 17-year old Brent (played by Xavier Samuel), who becomes wracked with guilt after his fathers death, and thus descends into a life of weed smoking, metal music and well, more weed smoking. Brent is asked out to the prom by Lola Stone (Robin McLeavey), and he rejects her. With the help of her daddy she kidnaps Brent and basically tortures him for our own enjoyment and to presumably for the film-makers to showcase a immense hatred of women.
‘The Loved Ones’ is one of the most misogynistic movies I’ve seen in recent times. I found it even more so than Lars Von Triers’ ‘AntiChrist’. This is a particularly worrying trend in recent horror cinema, and ‘The Loved Ones’ is on a level higher than say ‘Hostel Part 2’, because at least the director of that movie Eli Roth bothered to portray a strong sincere female character – In ‘The Loved Ones’ the key problem is not that Lola Stone is the main villain, or the ‘torturer’ (this is part of it – but more on that later); the problem is that the writer/director Sean Byrne overloads the film with subplots and characters that feature not a single strong female to balance things out. Everything seems to go out of its way to put down women.
Let me explain:
There are four plots running at once during ‘The Loved Ones’:
1)The main arc: Brent gets tortured by Lola and her sick family.
2)Brent’s drug addicted and on-welfare mother sits at home waiting for Brent to arrive home. She teams up with Brent’s girlfriend Holly (Victoria Thaine) to look for him – the furthest they get is the help of the:
3)Police Officer, who looks for Brent. Inexplicably a huge part of the movie is the:
4)Police Officer’s drugged out/ metal head daughter on a date to the dance with a bumbling teenager; who is also a pothead – the connection that this half an hour of the movie section has with the rest in so minuscule and tiny that at one point I thought it may have been a short film made prior to the feature just inserted into expand the screen-time.
The running theme between all these stories is that women are either psychotic and want to kill men. Or that women are useless and want nothing but to submit to a man, preferably one with drugs, one who has a car, one who is a police officer, one who is a father. Etc. None of the female characters in the movie are stable and none of them are independent. ‘The Loved Ones’ seems to go out of its way to bring this across.
Xavier Samuel, just like the ‘Twilight’ character he portrays; displays not a single interesting aspect, or for that matter a recognizable human emotion (besides extreme pain). Fair enough that the guilt of his fathers death has affected his life so much, but if I truly believed the movie to be sincere I would not have an issue with this. The character reacts to their fathers death like a ‘movie character’ – not how a real person would.
A plot development like the father dying and the main character taking the blame – is not full characterization. Thats a singular fact in the characters backstory. Not an objective, not a through-line, not an interesting aspect of an individual. If the point is to make the character 100% entirely passive, then they succeeded, but this is what makes the film of poor construction. How do you make a film whose main character is a cliche and does nothing to further the plot anyway interesting? Well I guess you surround that character with many, many, many other characters and make them more interesting than the protagonist. Here Byrne does this with both the hero and the villain characters.
The hero and protagonist Brent, is monotone, boring and completely unsympathetic – he fu*ks over his loving girlfriend and spends his entire days smoking copious amounts of weed and rocking out to metal music- If he is not doing that, then he is inexplicably scaling huge cliff faces- sigh – if you met this character in real life; firstly you wouldn’t because no-one like this exists- and secondly, if you did, you would not possibly be able to relate to him. It’s not a real character and as its the protagonist the movie simply cannot support itself structurally. If the main character is not somewhat engaging with the story and/or is actively moving the plot along it ceases to be relatable.
I found a section in the press release that concerned itself with the creation of the character of Brent: ‘Byrne describes how the character of Brent first appeared to him as a single image of a bloodied teenager in a tuxedo tied to chair in the middle of a balloon littered floor. After the image came to him Byrne started to ask: “Who is this kid, how did he get there? And if he’s going to be our hero?… What does his makeup have to be like?”’.
You connect with a character through their relatability. For a film to be relatable, you have to recognize some truth in it. To see that truth the director/writer has to be coming from a real place. And that place is usually of some thematic interest to the director/writer. This is how you distinguish cliche from originality. No matter how tried and true a story is, if it is coming from the direct emotional experience/response of the film-makers; then it becomes original – because Nobody Else on the planet has that same emotional viewpoint. Its almost a voyeurism thing – you see the world through somebody’s else eyes – and you want to relate to that vision.
Thats how a film will work. AND IN HORROR its imperative. A horror film’s entire construction – especially a torture film like this ones – is predicated entirely on whether or not you care for the victim/hero. Since Byrne seems overly concerned with visuals, and petty things like make up instead of an emotional connection to the material is worrying.
The very way in which Lola is dealt with, is even worse. The point seems to be that women are crazy, and women will go to crazy lengths to get men to do what they want – but at the end of the day men will always win no matter what women do…but it can’t even stick to this point because it favors shock value. See it is kind of interesting to see Lola having sexual tension with her father in one scene, but it is not there for a build up, and it goes nowhere – you just realize its there purely for shock value.
Thats what a lot of ‘The Loved Ones’ is; pure shock value. There are no characters. There is no story, and even if there was; they insert so much random shock value into it – that if you stop to think about it for one second it a)makes zero sense and b) starts disintegrating the movie from within.
It winds up incredibly inconsistent with theme and plot.
A storyline like this could have dealt with all the insecurities of teenage dating and romance instead of glamorizing drugs, sex, metal music and violence. At one point in the movie Lola seems to embody every teenager who had a crush and who feels insecure because of that crush. It is incredibly relatable- but then you realize that the film is doing nothing else but play the Missy Higgins song ‘Not Pretty Enough’. I’m sorry but this isn’t film-making. All of the emotional power is many scenes is directly derived from that song – it’s cheap and it’s a gimmick. It’s Michael Moore levels of manipulation. ‘Pretty in Pink’ this ain’t.
They are selling the movie as a John Hughes movie mixed with a torture porn movie. This is wrong on so many levels. Firstly, it barely scratches the surface of teenage love, in fact I would go as far as saying it says nothing more than “teenagers like sex and drugs”. Secondly, the torture elements are completely weak-sauce. It isn’t particularly gory (well this depends on your exposure – if you have seen a ‘Saw’ movie for example, then you’ve seen MUCH MUCH worse then what is shown here. The furthest this movie ever goes is salt being poured directly onto a wound. It does not deserve to be touted and praised for its torture elements. They are tame and they are not creative, nor are they particularly well done. When you also take into consideration that the victim is incredibly unsympathetic and the awful portrayal of female characters; you end up with a terrible experience.
If a film only tries to be like other films; it will fail. A horror film cannot ever be fully ‘realistic’ because a film writer or director hasn’t ever been tortured (in most cases) to the point of nearly dying. In order to make a successful horror film a film-maker needs to understand this limitation. It’s for this reason why characterization of the victims is so important – because nobody can relate to having a drill in their forehead, but they can to being rejected by their crush. Torture porn films can’t really fully work anyway.
And the problem is you.
See, as a viewer you are paying to see this. Ask yourself why? Why are you paying to see a poor young man being tortured? Why are you watching this? Do you have a problem? Do you enjoy seeing pain? No of course you don’t. In fact every time you leave a horror film you say how scary it is, how horrible it was. But you wouldn’t put yourself in that situation in real life would you? You want to see pain to be entertained. And thats your problem. Thats my problem, we enjoy this kind of thing.
The issue at hand is that film-makers like Greg Maclean (‘Wolf Creek’) and the ‘Saw’ guys, and Eli Roth (‘Hostel’ series) – And even film-makers who deal with violence in general like Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher etc. They all understand this in someway or another. The violence has to either be as real or possible so people can witness and relate to the horror of it. Or it has to be so ridiculous and hilariously over the top that people can laugh at it and be entertained. Its called ‘The Responsibility Of A Writer’ – You have to either provide truth or entertainment. There is no middle ground that works. The only way a film arrives at a middle ground is if it tries so hard to please an audience instead of sorting out its own structural/thematic problems.
You don’t get to the treasure without once looking at the map.
If this movie is a map; the only thing that helps us get anywhere is some of the acting. Whilst the script and dialogue are partly to blame; the acting is still pretty uniformly bad. Robin McLeavy as Lola, and John Brumpton as the dad, are sufficiently creepy and sadistic. McLeavy, however, is the star of the show, and whilst some of her delivery is overdone, she works. And if she was given a proper storyline I think she could have knocked it out of the park.
Problems like that really showcase how much the crappy structure affects the rest of the film, right down to the performances and the tone. See the pacing of a thriller/horror is really important and ‘The Loved Ones’ constantly jumps from subplot to subplot muddling everything up. Since all the minuscule amounts of character information are repeated during the torture scenes they should have taken those moments and expanded them out to the whole feature. It would have been a much more torturous experience and much more thrilling. Simple things like cutting outside the torture room to a police officer sleeping in bed slow down the pacing, and hence remove any tension – because now you know that the cop will have to be involved later on, otherwise why did they bother showing you that? The movie subplot juggles all the time and it’s really ineffective and I cannot stress how irritating it is.
There is a entire subplot (running around a half hour) that consists entirely of a couple of teenagers on a date to the prom. They take drugs in the car; they drink in the car; they fu*k in the car. It all seems mostly irrelevant until something so minor; (that it screamed ‘FILLER!!’ so loud it hurt my ears) is revealed as the connection of this subplot to the main plot.
If you were to take the meat of ‘The Loved Ones’,( i.e what would be considered: plot, theme and story) the running time would be around a half an hour.
The other extremely annoying thing is that ‘plot, theme and story’ derive from Lola and how interesting she is. Thats why I bet you were interested in seeing the movie, that’s why I was. The movie is interesting because of that character, but It’s all mangled and chopped up. The only important/interesting bits comprise a half hour of an already extremely short 84 minutes. It’s pretentiously made also – with long close ups of eyes, and long shots of nothingness – even the violence is shot so weakly, and you don’t see anything at all. Its not really confronting. From a cinematography viewpoint and in terms of a standard horror film; it looks pretty good.
Actually the cinematography in the film by Simon Chapman (2011’s ‘Griff The Invisible’ – Which on a quick note: I have been lucky enough to attend a test screening of, and I can say that it is one of the most awesome Australian flicks in a long time) is quite nice: but it was the directorial decisions that were the issue. Lola wears a pink dress, and its the only pink color in the movie. This is Freud 101 right here, and its execution was not subtle. At one point you watch a chicken drumstick get wielded like a penis.
At multiple points you see dead animals. Come to think about it the violence towards animals thing occurs constantly in Australian Cinema, we even saw it in our best film this year: ‘Animal Kingdom’. And its always violence towards dogs. Its an easy thing to do: Lets harm an animal in our movie, because everyone loves animals and they will feel sad. It is one of the cheapest manipulations possible in cinema.
Manipulations like this appear all through-out ‘The Loved Ones’. And because they rely on shock value so much the structure winds up all over the place. Its like if the Olympic games decided to combine a marathon race with the hurdles, having to make the marathon athletes jump every 200 meters they run. It’s exhausting to go from an intense scene to a quiet scene, to a slow scene etc. And when you compound this with subplots that are seemingly unrelated to the main story – it just becomes an epic slog.
Every trick in the book is here.
Lets take the sick family members that sit around the dinner table – A stolen element of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. Then there’s the torture elements of ‘Saw’, ‘Hostel’, and ‘Wolf Creek’, lets take their graphic gore, their cheeky comedy elements. etc etc. Hell, at one point Brent escapes, (and it’s like 20 minutes into the movie) -only if you were a moron would you think that the movie would be now start rolling its end credits – and that he wont get recaptured. This is just an example of the lazy story conventions.
That’s one thing that pissed me off about this film above others; was how lazy and uninspired it was. There were at least ten moments I counted during the second half where they could have easily taken the horror conventions and flipped them on their head. There were so many moments of the movie that were so cliche and horrid, that whilst they are happening you think that Sean Byrne is going to find a way to flip them. Alas no they just exist as they do in every other movie.
Point: If you guess the ending of ‘The Loved Ones’ within 20 minutes; why should you bother staying in the theater? Well, maybe because the characters are interesting? Nope they aren’t. Maybe you might be of that awful mindset: ‘Oh look dudes getting fu*king tortured by a crazy bitch, and there’s sex and weed smoking! This is so fu*king cool!’…well, if thats you then I can’t argue with that – you would be the target audience.
‘The Loved Ones’ tries so hard to please a specific audience. It tries so very hard to be like other movies – that it ultimately becomes nothing itself. It becomes nothing but a weak-sauce, unoriginal and tiresome experience.
If this movie solely consisted of cheap gimmicks and gore that you’ve seen before; then I would have normally given the movie a pass as just a ‘bad’ film, but because of the rampant anti women themes and the severe lack of attention to the story and character I hate this movie. The only decent thing in the movie is Robin McLeavy.
I think it is ironic that so many reviewers are calling the most anti-women film I’ve seen in a while; the very best date movie of the year.
Shame.
2/10.
PussADD
THEY’RE MAYBE, PROBABLY, DOUBTFULLY, MAKING A ‘SCREAM 5′
In a recent interview with Movieweb.com; Wes Craven basically said what every person in Hollywood will ever say about any sequel: ‘If it makes money, we’ll make another one.’ Read more…