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Vile, pointless, humourless, style-bereft torture porn. |
Inbred (2011) *1/2
dir. Alex Chandon
Starring: Jo Hartley, Seamus O'Neill, James Doherty, James Burrows,
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Inbred is sickening. Other than that, there's really no reason for this moronically vile picture to exist. It's humourless, irredeemably nasty, lacking suspense and aimed squarely at the most indiscriminating genre fans. The screenplay, such as it is, appears to have been crafted overnight, whilst the direction is strictly by-the-numbers.
Two case workers bring four at-risk youth to an abandoned house to learn teamwork and demonstrate their survival skills. Unluckily for the lot of them, they're surrounded by inbreds from the nearby village. One by one, the six of them are brutally kidnapped, tortured and murdered.
That's about it, folks.
Obviously influenced by Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but lacking that film's intelligence, panache and brilliantly constructed nightmare logic we're left with carnage for the sake of carnage.
Oh, and it's British.
As such, the White Trash on display are so much more erudite than their drawling counterparts in the southernmost regions of the colonies. No Texas BBQ made from human flesh, please. We're British.
On a technical front, the picture is well enough made. The locations and art direction evoke a suitably creepy atmosphere and the cinematography is perfectly competent. The special makeup effects and gore are superbly rendered, but ultimately all this is for nought as the movie is dull, nasty and singularly pointless save for wallowing in the violence.
The villains are costumed and performed with a bit of panache, but the "heroes" have little going for them as characters or even character-types that we're quite happy to see them dispatched in the most horrendous ways.
Perhaps this was the point. Perhaps this is why we're supposed to ascribe an innate intelligence to the film. Well, "perhaps" isn't much to make the movie more than what it is. Perhaps it's more fake than all the Hollywood films that are so purportedly empty because it pretends to be more than torture porn.
By the end of the movie, the inbreds walk into the sunset in silhouette. This, for sure, must mean it's "art".
I was jaw agape at the senselessness of what I had just subjected myself to. I love horror films and I'm perfectly fond of inbreds, but I finally had no idea why anyone, save perhaps for an inbred, would actually enjoy the film.
Yes, there's some clumsy subtext about rural life yielding a meanness rooted in ages-old tradition stemming from the exploitation of the downtrodden in contrast to the emptiness of the urban teens whose "badness" is banal and rooted in no sense of history and tradition, but none of this is dealt with in any interesting or intelligent way.
Finally, it really is all about the torture.
This is the film's biggest failing. It's not scary. It's just gross.
And that's what's really gross.
"Inbred" is part of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival (TADFF 2012). For more information, visit the festival website HERE.
