Z/Web

Usually I fast-forward through these kinds of movies and don’t bother to comment on them. This horror film about a small group in an apocalyptic world who fight off cannibals at a farmhouse had an interesting cast (one of the hobbits from Lord of the Rings is in it), so I recorded it. It’s not a great movie — but it’s got some unusual appeal and I ended up actually watching it.

It starts off really slow with a rag-tag group of survivors finding a deserted farmhouse and making camp there. Everyone is on edge and terrified, but we don’t know why. There are hints that the world ended ten years earlier, but there’s no explanation of exactly what happened. I liked that. There are a couple of flashbacks from some of the characters, but they’re brief and it’s not too heavy-handed.

One of their group is a strange woman who doesn’t talk. She’s an outsider and a loner. Then suddenly the men are attacked: the farmhouse is a trap by cannibal tribe who plan on eating them. The odd woman fights them off and kills them, but not before one of them talks to her and reveals that she’s a cannibal, too. That’s when things get interesting: suddenly her friends attack her and torture her and plan to kill her. One of the men had his wife and daughter killed by cannibals and he’s the most avid about making the odd woman’s death as painful as possible.

But this isn’t really the right time for that: reinforcements of the cannibals are coming, and if the group is caught on the open road, they’d be easily slaughtered. At least at the farmhouse they have a fighting chance. And they decide to keep the woman alive for the moment, as she knows the cannibal ways and can help them fight. She reveals that her baby sister got sick and was eaten by her tribe, and so she killed them and ran away. The others don’t think that she’s really changed and plan to kill her for her crimes anyway.

That whole “Is she a friend or not?” question was fascinating and well-done. The actual cannibal fighting was merely okay. Really annoying was the high-frequency sound-effects the director used — we’re the talking dog whistle variety that grates on your nerves and was clearly designed to freak out the viewer but just pissed me off and trite and far too obvious. The ending was unusual and pretty cool.

In the end, I have to recommend the film if you’re into gory horror of the dark variety. It’s got some intriguing ideas. It’s definitely not a film for everyone, and even fans will find it dry at times, but it’s got just enough depth to take it slightly above routine horror.

I wasn’t a big fan of the “original”, and my feelings remained in this one. It has similarly non-sensical plot problems (particularly galling is how regular people turn into villains with little provocation and the way they master their superpowers with zero effort or practice), and though it has a few clever ideas (I liked the explanation for why the spider bite worked on Peter Parker), those good things are offset by other flaws. Combine that with a bizarre and sad ending and I’m still asking, “Why’d they bother?”