Movies
[BD Review] Cultish Thriller ‘Jug Face’ A Creepy Slow-Burn
Moderncine is a company that should receive more praise than it gets. They’ve become the model for consistency, delivering a flurry of well made independent films over the past few years (including The Woman, Offspring and Ghoul). The 2013 Slamdance Film Festival played host to the world premiere of Jug Face, a cultish thriller from producer Lucky McKee and director Chad Crawford Kinkle.
The pic, which re-teams The Woman stars Lauren Ashley Carter and Sean Bridgers, follows a large backwoods community who live their lives by worshipping a pit. The pit is their God, and apparently one that is very real. There’s a treaty in place, where a semi-shaman, played by Bridgers, is given a vision to sculpt the “next” sacrifice on a jug. Said face is to be executed to the pit. Failure to comply makes the put angry, and hell ensues. You get the idea.
Jug Face feels really small, in a good way, and captures the essence of this tiny group of worshippers. It’s aesthetically similar to other Moderncine movies; it’s a look that gives the film quality and technical shows expertise. Although, it’s carried by strong performances, and a few explicate shots of gore.
If anything, Jug Face fits into the world of May. Although someone else directs the pic, it feels much like a Lucky McKee film. Knowing this, fans should expect an insanely bizarre and creepy slow-burn with a lot of good ideas, and precise execution. It also harbors the lesson: don’t fuck with the pit…
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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