Movies
[Toronto After Dark ’12] Lonmonster’s Mini Review: ‘Inbred’ & ‘Crave’
The seventh annual Toronto After Dark Film Festival began this week, bringing a lineup chock full of horror delights just in time for Halloween season. TAD might be one of the smaller genre festivals around, but its importance is undeniable in indie genre cinema.
Showing 20 films over the course of a week, the hometown Toronto crowd is treated to some of the year’s most anticipated horror films. My coverage below consists of mini-reviews for what I’ve seen thus far.
Inbred
Inbred, directed by Alex Chandon, is a British splatstick comedy that explores deranged country hillbillies and all their violent tendencies. The film follows a group of troubled youth and their caretakers who venture into a town full of inbred hicks for a bonding weekend. Unfortunately, the hicks don’t take too kindly to new folk. The film is loaded with crude humor, fecal matter, gore, and snaggletoothed grins.
While there’s much potential behind the idea of troubled city kids fighting off a group of inbred country locals, it’s all lost in a lack of effort to offer any sort of characterization. Instead what you get is a frustrating plot packed with obscenely gory kills. Inbred delivers on the laugh factor, but the city kids react so nonsensically in almost every situation they’re faced with. SPOILER One of the kids is a self-proclaimed professional arsonist, but when it comes time for him to shine, he doesn’t notice that the liquor he’s about to set fire to is actually water. One would think a troubled British city kid who was sent to juvy for burning down his school would know the taste of alcohol.
Inbred has its charms, particularly the quirky the horror pastiche on racism and minstrel shows. The kills are fun, and the inbred copy of Leatherface makes this film worth a watch alone. But it’s void of any emotion and plot, making Inbred ultimately pointless.
2/5 Skulls
==========================
Crave
Crave is a thriller comedy mashup up flick that manages to play on every genre you could imagine, yet it’s like nothing I’ve seen before. Aiden, a crime scene photojournalist, is overtaken by delusions of grandeur as he attempts to cope with his growing hatred for humanity. Sick of being a gutless loser, Aiden takes it upon himself to make the world, or his world, a better place. This comes in the form of a gun, a detective (Ron Perlman), and a new girlfriend who is way out of his league. Charles de Lauzirika delivers an exceptional flick with the help of lead actor Josh Lawson who combines the tragedy of Travis Bickle with the antics of Larry David.
While Crave starts off rather slowly, de Lauzirikia shows poise by not rushing into heavy action. Aiden’s character is constructed, making his mental deterioration all the more amusing. Aiden is an awkward, disturbed, single 35-year-old dude who doesn’t notice his own cries for help. Crave has many aspects of a twisted romantic comedy that some may find a bit too sugary, but the breaking of the 4th wall and Aiden’s violent daydreams create an enjoyable absurdity.
I’m shocked this flick isn’t making more of a splash on the indie scene. It’s simply a great film with captivating on-screen performances from Josh Lawson and Ron Perlman. The cinematography is gorgeous, helping to make Aiden’s sad situation feel all the more whimsical. Unlike many films that deal with a delusional protagonist that end in tragedy, Crave manages to leave you feeling oddly uplifted.
4/5 Skulls
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
You must be logged in to post a comment.