If your loved one wants to make horror movies, your support is so important. But you also have a responsibility to point out their flaws—especially when that flaw is an entire movie they are about to inflict on the rest of us!
THE FAMILY (2011)
Even if you’re making a horror movie and you want it to be totally cool, wild, trippy, perverse, insane, bloody, violent, and an excuse to get former adult film stars to bare their huge fake tits for you, The Family demonstrates why you still really need a script. Honestly, I’m not sure there was one used here, or even any game plan. We are tossed instantly into an hour and a half of chaos and confusion.
There are people. Lots of them, and we don’t really have any clue who they are or how they got wherever they are. There’s sex. There are kills. There’s torture. There’s plenty of heavy metal music. There are two Rob Zombie looking brothers who more often seem way too intimately bonded—even when fighting—to be brothers. Although it may be totally normal in the neck of the trailer park from which they appear to come.
I think the movie is about a family that drugs people then makes them the stars in snuff porn. In one scene, a chick jerks a guy off until his penis detaches. Someone’s filming it, and another bound dude is being forced to watch. Occasionally, a freak in a hoodie and a really creepy mask wanders on set and tortures a woman—wish he would wander over to the set of a movie of his own, because he deserves one. More and more “characters” appear and start shooting each other up.
Eventually, everyone still alive ends up in an old abandoned prison. Kane Hodder and Tony Todd show up (daddies need a paycheck) to give blatant nods to their Jason and Candyman characters, respectively, as they stalk victims in the prison. Again, another opportunity for a cool movie that isn’t this one. Oh, and also, horror icon Michael Berryman is in the movie as…well…I don’t know, but, he’s in it.
Someone give this guy a budget so he can make the two awesome horror movies that got buried in this one.
STOMPING GROUND (2016)
With so many Bigfoot movies floating around these days—Exists totally ruling my world as the best (blog here) and Willow Creek ruining my life, which isn’t me just being melodramatic (blog here)—I was looking forward to a change of pace with a Bigfoot horror comedy, and Stomping Ground looked like it would totally do the trick.
It should have been called “Two Guys Vying for the Same Girl in the Woods…Oh, and There’s a Bigfoot at the End.”
A geeky dude goes to his girlfriend’s hometown and her hick friends take him on a hunt for Bigfoot. One of them is the girlfriend’s ex, so the entire movie is about the boyfriend getting jealous every time he sees the ex moving in on his girl as they explore the woods. The boyfriend and girlfriend talk about their feelings. Also, there’s a “comic relief” dude whose humor consists of tired redneck references.
50 minutes into the movie, they find blood and a body part. After a bit more of the boyfriend being jealous in case we didn’t catch on yet, out jumps someone in a Bigfoot Halloween costume (although the face is pretty cool), so they lock themselves in a cabin—and the couple talks more about their feelings. Then someone shoots Bigfoot, and they all go home.
That’s it. That’s the movie. It might actually be one of the better chick flicks out there, those just aren’t my thing.
