Well, my aim to blog more regularly hasn't been going fantastically well, but better late than never! Yesterday I was pretty bored and looking for something to easily pass the time. And what better choice that a low budget horror film! The more obscure the better. So I went for a little know Australian film called The Loved Ones. Basic plot is, crazy girl abducts high school hunk, and inexplicably tortures him at a home made prom night in the company of her father and invalid mother. I know what you are thinking, standard Saturday night in, yeh? Pretty much within the genre of gorenography, you can appreciate the efforts gone into to try and make this a more original film, but it does seem somewhat lacking.
The main give away for this feeling is the inclusion of seemingly pointless subplots. We repeatedly flit out to the main character's hapless best friend on a date with someone way out of his league, but a little off the rails. It provides the occasional bit of comic relief to ease the tension of the main scenes, but holds absolutely no bearing to the development of the main plot. Only a tenuous link is made between the girl and a previous victim of the psycho prom queen. This comes across to me as lazy writing, or at the very least just a bit desperate to make the film feature length. I get the feeling that they came up with the concept for the film initially, but had trouble in the screenwriting process to pad out the whole scenario to something over an hour. The answer; meaningless filler plot! The staple of any failing horror film.
So flagging sub-plots aside, when we are viewing the main action, it is quite good viewing. They manage to aptly build tension as the tortures of our lead get progressively worse. The thing I like about the approach here, is that they don't stop at the stage you think they will. Where as our normal expectation of a horror film would normal take us up to the point of maximum tension, and then hit us with some relief, a narrow escape, or a cut away, The Loved Ones delivers on the promise of what the tension has been building towards. For example, the psycho girl at one point is looking to drill a hole in the forehead of our protagonist. This is slowly built, with a few mishaps in her handling of the drill along the way, but right as the tension has been built up to breaking point, instead of the jump and calm, she just keeps going. We get to see her drilling into this young gentleman's head, and through his skull. Even a bit of smoke coming off it, just to you know how rough this is. They are nothing if not helpful in getting you into the moment in horror films. This happens in a few other instances in the process, from nailing his feet to the floor to injecting his throat with bleach so that he can't scream, apparently. (I'm not too sure on the scientific accuracy of this last one, but I am never one to question the logistics of a horror film too deeply)
Now the lead male in this piece (Brent) isn't the most empathetic character in the world. Sure, he is set up as being partly responsible for his dad's death when he crashes a car they are both in, so you start think he can't be all bad, and has had some trouble in his life, undoubtedly making him quite surly. But he does come across as quite melodramatic at times. Wearing a razor blade round his neck on a chain, so that he can self harm at any given moment to awesome rock music to showcase his teenage angst. While we are on the topic, his girlfriend notices his self abuse mark in the opening five minutes of the film, but just ignores them and carries on. No wonder he's got issues. Nobody seems to give a shit about this guy. Least of all me. I'm never really fussed enough about the outcome of this picture to really be rooting for anyone. I'm not cheering the villain and I am not cheering the 'hero'. In fact I am not cheering at all. Just sitting watching a film. Do please note, I don't actually spend most of my time literally cheering in room by myself watching films, complete with foam hand and vuvuzela. I'm more of an air horn guy anyway.
But in all the film is watchable. Not something I would watch again any time soon, but definitely worth a look if you really like the new wave of gore-horror films. The cast varies massively in the quality of performance, but the really memorable ones are the two crazies. They have an odd chemistry on screen which shows a lot of different sides to their, admittedly weird, relationship. There is the obvious protective father and daughter combo, the nurturing trainer and trainee ensemble, and the frankly weird man and woman Oedipus thing. This is by far the most uncomfortable thing to watch in the film, but at least they are trying to make things different. As the characters are the resident psychos in this flick, they are always going to be the ones with the most character, and most leash for the actors to go all out with the eccentricities. The psycho queen does well to flip between all out crazy lady and sweet yet malevolent girl, to make her an unpredictable force to be reckoned with. She evens gets her own Jason Vorhess/Michael Myers moment, when she is diligently crawling after her pray with a knife, after being hit by a speeding police car. Classic horror!
Happy viewing...
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