Ah. Those moments when horror movies leave you feeling totally unfulfilled. Since I had that experience two nights in a row, I’m just going to get Contagion and Jug Face over in one blog.
CONTAGION (1987)
Of course, you see 1987 as the year of release and you assume I’m going to automatically give the Australian horror film Contagion some points. Not even the 80s can save this hybrid slasher/backwoods/ghost story.
I guess you could say there are some cool atmospheric horror scenes, but they don’t make Contagion any better. First we see a motorcycle rider whipped off his bike by the old wire-tied-across-the-road trick. By the end of the film, you forget that ever happened.
Next, we meet a real estate agent who sets off on a dark night into the middle of nowhere to do a job. He sees some chick being assaulted by backwoods freaks and goes to help her. He gets caught, it’s implied that he gets the old Deliverance treatment, and then some chick saves him and brings him to a nice mansion to fix him up.
Next thing you know, the real estate agent is in the hospital, escapes there, steals a car, goes back to the mansion for dinner, talks to the man who owns the mansion about power and money, has a threesome with a couple of girls, and becomes the killer for the rest of the movie, inventively murdering select people for reasons that I didn’t understand or care about.
Meanwhile, his girlfriend (yep, he has one) tails him…in a plane…to what he thinks is the mansion but is really just a derelict structure in the middle of the woods. I guess you could say she becomes the final girl in this big mess.
JUG FACE (2013)
Sounds like a slasher about a dude with some sort of freaky face, right? Nope. This is deeper than that. In fact, it’s pretty much a religious superstition horror about a backwards—I mean, backwoods “town” (in this case, just a handful of people living in trailer homes) that worships a pit that needs sacrifices regularly.
There’s a Will Ferrell dude who blindly makes jug faces that the pit apparently tells him to carve. The person whose face is on the jug is sacrificed next. So a young girl who’s screwing her pretty brother finds the jug and realizes she’s about to be pit food, so she hides the jug.
Meanwhile, she gets offered as a bride to some other family because the community needs to keep procreating to make more people to sacrifice to the pit. The rule is that the bride-to-be is checked to make sure her virginity is intact, so the girl rubs animal blood all up in her crotch so it looks like she had her period…or that she’s “dripping” as her mother Sean Young puts it.
It gets worse. Because of the girl’s game of hide the jug face, other people in trailer town start dying. The pit is not happy with the switcheroo and the girl is being haunted by a ghost boy. And Sean Young fingers (and possibly fists) her to make sure she’s a virgin. You can imagine mom’s reaction after the test results are in….
The best part would have been when we finally see what hungry beast is actually in the muddy pit…but we never see anything. It’s like the Blair Witch all over again. Therefore, the best part award goes to the brother stripping to take a dip in the pit to be healed after he gets sick. And here’s a picture of the BILF:
I’m sure there’s some sort of film theory over-analysis that can be made about the pit being a metaphor for the va-jay-jay and birth and morality and heaven and hell and the evils of sex or some stupid smart shit like that, but I just wanted to see a fucking jug faced killer in Jug Face.
