It’s a triple feature of movies about women gone mad, two with eating issues and another with religious issues. Best news of all is that along with these crazy killer bitches comes some man meat.
TRULY, MADLY (2020)
Indie director Brian Dorton has several movies under his belt that contain queer themes and characters, and he’s usually heavy on the exploitation tradition. He does low budget, locally made movies, which is very apparent with Truly, Madly. It has that look and feel, and grindhouse effects are applied to somewhat mask those shortcomings. If you read my posts regularly, you know how I feel about the forced grindhouse vibe, which is even announced on a title card at the beginning of this movie as an artistic choice and not a problem with the source you’re using to watch the movie. It’s an unnecessary call out considering we’ve been bombarded with this novelty in indie horror movies since the Grindhouse: Planet Terror/Death Proof double feature made it trendy again in 2007. Other than making Truly, Madly visually more reminiscent of old theater movies rather than a direct to-video film, the effects add nothing to the atmosphere, and it comes across as particularly gimmicky, especially considering there’s even a “missing reel” moment tossed in for good measure. The throwback I appreciate much more is the early 80s style synth score. It’s spot on and better captures the horror atmosphere than the filters in this case.
However, the filters and music don’t particularly coincide with what happens in the film. There are no suspense scenes, chase scenes, or intensely gruesome and violent kills. The plot is simply about a religious extremist mother who starts killing all her gay son’s friends after the death of her husband. She isn’t particularly scary, menacing, or over-the-top wacky. She matter-of-factly stabs people when she gets them alone and then goes on with her life.
The only death scene that comes close to delivering on grindhouse action is when she wields a chainsaw. While it’s still a bit restrained, it better captures what you might be expecting from a mental mom.
Religion and bigotry are the actual horror here, and it’s important to note the difference in viewpoint from a creator from Southern and Midwestern locations (as Dorton is) and creators from more progressive environments. Horror films are commonly presented as showing city folk venturing into the unknown of backwoods states and meeting up with crazy shit, but in a small town film like this, the vision is perhaps reflective of the creator’s lived experiences. The whole point is that there are people that don’t fit the backwoods mold yet have to live with the crazy shit every day of their lives, which is the horror movie in which they are trapped.
As a result, the focus is on hypocrisy of small town religious folk (the monsters) and the ways in which they judge and threaten the lives of those that are not like them. There’s a lot happening here, with the gay son, a trans character (played by Dorton), and themes of religious addiction, incest, mental health, self-harm, sexual assault, pedophilia, bullying, suicide, and infidelity. However, it’s all presented mostly just to counter the mindset of the mother and make a point, not to substantially delve into any one issue.
The good news about this being made by a queer filmmaker is that the gay content, which lands this on the homo horror movies page, is the one aspect that isn’t held back; we get a male shower scene and a scene of two men naked in bed. I fricking love the perspective of this shot. It’s a work of art all on its own.
And finally, in the tradition of classic horror that explores subversive queer issues, Truly, Madly isn’t as straightforward as it initially seems when we get to the final act.
CRAZY FAT ETHEL (2016)
Crazy Fat Ethel is a remake of a 1975 film called Criminally Insane (which I’ve never seen), and it comes to us from…Brian Dorton! Yay! This film feels better streamlined and focused than Truly, Madly, with scenes and sequences that feel much more intentionally crafted and planned out.
For starters, while this is clearly a full-fledged, subversive exploitation flick, there are no forced filters, yet the style comes through perfectly in the way the film is shot, the lighting, and the sets. The gore is nice and bloody (according to IMDb they used real animal meat to make everything icky), and the tone is sleazy and trashy.
The performances and editing also outshine Truly, Madly, which suffers from those weird pauses between lines of dialogue that create a disjointed delivery during conversations, a common occurrence in indie films. The only real bummer for me was that there’s something wrong with the audio on the Amazon stream of Crazy Fat Ethel, so a good chunk, starting about 30 minutes in, is drowned out by a constant audio glitch—I had to turn on subtitles so I could understand what was being said.
Ethel, who is portrayed as totally crazy (there’s nothing campy about her performance), is released from a mental institution and goes to live with her aunt, whose husband Ethel was believed to have murdered, which landed her in the asylum in the first place.
All Ethel wants to do is eat, so whenever anyone hinders her opportunity to stuff her face, she goes nuts and offs them. Awesome.
There’s plenty of gross, skanky shit happening along the way, and some clever techniques are used to capture the moments—like a heterosexual ass-eating caught from the perspective of the asshole. This is how you do low budget exploitation right. Yet at the same time there are wonderfully artistic elements, like a bizarre dream sequence that infuses gluttony and religious imagery.
And most importantly, the whole point of the film—Ethel’s obsession with eating—comes into play in the way we would hope in a nasty flick about a voracious killer.
PIGGY (2022)
A perfect movie to couple with Crazy Fat Ethel, Piggy is a Spanish film that brilliantly takes the bullying/revenge subgenre to a different place.
In a small village, an overweight girl named Sara works at her family’s butcher shop and is badly bullied by a group of popular girls.
She’s also bullied by her own mother, who is pressuring her to lose weight so she won’t be a target of the girls.
The intriguing and unexpected approach to the plot really keeps the viewer riveted. Sara goes for a swim when there is usually no one in the public pool, only to find she’s not alone in more than one creepy and disturbing way.
The bullying girls take her clothes, leaving her to walk home in her bikini. This is definitely a questionable detail, because chances are no self-conscious, overweight girl would ever wear just a bikini in a public pool, even if she thought she was alone.
What transpires next is wild. On a desolate dirt road, Sara sees the girls being abducted by a guy in a van. Adding a brilliantly effective touch, after the driver opens his door and drops her clothes on the ground for her, she gives him a wave of thanks that simultaneously seems to be a wave goodbye to one of the girls begging for help at the back window of the van as it drives away.
Essentially exploring the innate good or bad traits within people, the film is about emotionally battered and bruised Sara struggling with the conflict of doing the right thing or the wrong but much more satisfying thing. There’s a fascinating romanticizing of her connection to the killer (there are literally fireworks when the two first come intimately face to face), and he becomes somewhat of a guardian angel/Prince Charming for her even while we know he’s a psycho.
The best part of all this is that Sara is actually an attractive girl, and her killer is presented in a frighteningly sexy way—sure he’s a backwoods psycho, but he’s also undeniably masculine and hunky in a protective “daddy will take care of you as long as you do exactly what he says” kind of way, if you know what I mean.
The sexual tension whenever they meet is sizzling hot, and Sara seems to be basically falling in love with him even as he’s destroying her life. Not to mention, this silent creep driving around in a van was giving me serious High Tension vibes.
Yet despite the elevated concepts, the movie doesn’t forget it’s a horror flick, especially when we arrive at the final confrontation in the killer’s lair. And the film even addresses viewer bias when it presents us with the visual look of the “hero” at the end of the movie. Pretty sneaky, sis.
