While not a particularly frightening experience, Inbred should satisfy fans of the backwoods inbreed genre and splatter gore. It’s a smorgasbord of dark humor, torture, and siege film, all delivered in a kindler, gentler way.
Two youth workers take a group of delinquents on a retreat to a house in a small town. Then they all go to a bar and meet the locals….
Effectively using the slow-burning approach, the first 40 minutes of the film are loaded with ominous hints of what’s to come. Then the group has a run in with some of the more vile dudes in town and the insanity really begins.
Inbred is very much like 2000 Maniacs if only half the townsfolk were good old normal hillbillies and the other half were deformed inbreeds. Yet despite some gruesome scenarios, it’s oddly reserved. Your stomach is in knots fearing what is about to be done to helpless victims, but then you’re sort of like, “That wasn’t so bad.” The kills aren’t as graphic and brutal as you anticipate considering the circumstances, plus the effects are mostly CGI, so the deaths are very easy to sit through. And the freak show never steps too far into the torture zone.
The townsfolk, while not laugh out loud comical, become more and more backwoods goofy as the film progresses, which negates the promise of mounting tension or terror. There’s plenty of weird townsfolk behavior. One dude wears fricking black face. A maggot-eating leather daddy unzips another guy’s pants and out pops a ferret, which the leather daddy begins to stroke like it’s a penis. Another guy likes to masturbate a carrot, so you brace yourself for sexual brutality, but it never happens. The film always threatens to be worse than it turns out to be—which is kind of a relief, considering it flirts with some gruesome possibilities!
But in the end, the townsfolk rely mostly on guns to kill their victims. The few remaining survivors hole up in the house to take cover. The doors are falling apart, there are windows galore…yet the townsfolk just hang around outside. They never storm the place or try to sneak in, and the survivors don’t seem to worry that they will. So the only thing that’s going to move the film forward at this point is if the survivors leave the house! And that’s never a good plan….
Inbred is definitely a curious hybrid. It could easily become the next Wrong Turn franchise or they could just give us a movie that explores why there’s a town full of inbred folk. Because, unlike the 2000 Maniacs clan, the truth behind the Inbred clan remains a mystery….
Hmmmmmm, sounds interesting. Not a huge fan of mindless, endless blood, guts, and gore. Torture Porn is just not very appealing, so finding out this wasn’t so bad kinda makes me wanna see it more than I typically would.