Directed by Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores.
Starring Cory Knauf, Taylor Cole, Bret Roberts, Christina Prousalis and Tiffany Shepis.
SYNOPSIS:
One night at a secluded farmhouse deep in the Northern California woods, a small group of hardened young bikers and their girlfriends are tormented when one of the girls becomes savagely possessed and a gang of "Rockabillies" seemingly from the 1950s descends upon them to collect what is growing inside her.
The straight to DVD market is a mystery to me. How does it survive? Who buys these discs of disappointment? Even the covers are a massive warning sign. Yet somehow people buy them. I’ve never once met one of these people and I actually wonder whether they exist or could it be that the studio is hired to come up with a formulaic friendly piece of garbage to stop dust gathering on some of the shelf space at the local Blockbusters. Not that I’ve seen many of these at Blockbusters, either. Yet, somehow films like The Violent Kind come around to yet again kick down my faith in the film industry.
What is there to say? Well let’s start with the story and I’ll try and hold back the vomit as I dive beneath the scab ridden surface. We’re introduced to the main characters of the film, one of them is in the middle of the most cheap sex scene I’ve ever seen outside of the porno sector. Post coitus, he and his white trash mates beat up some rough hillbilly types (one of them is threateningly called “Tim”). After this salute to white trash American culture (fightin’ n’ fuckin’), the guys skidaddle off to their biker gang’s club house. Yes, even with their Hollyoaks looks, they happen to be in a biker gang.
At the remote club house, there’s more drinking and fucking in such a shameless stupor, that I had to stop all irrational urges to get my TV sterilised. Utter filth. It was just tattoos, tits and tequila in all directions and not in a remotely good way either. I never thought I’d ever hear myself say that. Around this point I noticed how cheap the cameras were. I mean, there’s low budget, and then there’s filming off a high end camera phone with no tripod whatsoever. With a degree and experience in film making, it sickens you the amount of school boy errors that people get away with. Excuse me for a second whilst I do an angry walk around the room.
That’s better. Now, the rest of the film could have gone with the whole biker lifestyle shtick, but instead, they decided to do the From Dusk Till Dawn route and pull out a supernatural horror cat out of the bag. For some bizarre reason, one of the more whorish girls get’s possessed and spends the rest of the film bleeding, hissing, biting and trying it on with the guys at the same time. It’s a Freudian nightmare! And I’m afraid it all goes off the tracks from there. Turns out that the people behind it are a group of immortal rockabillies. Can anyone name me a film where that sort of twist would suit the narrative? At first, the rockabillies seem like they burst out from a Saturday morning cartoon about James Dean, but then it becomes clear that, despite goofy overacting, they’re the only people in the film that put any remote effort into their acting.
The acting stinks. It’s not just the fact that the dialogue could easily be replaced with accentuated grunting with no danger of mis-communicating the plot; it’s the mumbling tone everyone talks in. I have a feeling that part of it is the sound guy’s fault. I was turning my TV up to the point of buzzing to make out simple sentences. Thus, I had little idea of what was actually going on. I would have re-winded some of the scenes to get a better idea, but that would mean re-watching the film and that’s not a risk I’m prepared to take. Towards the end I was getting a headache from the lack of coherence and pointing out simple film mistakes. It’s beyond a joke and I hope all DVD copies get hurled into a combine harvester, before having the pile of plastic shards force fed to both of the directors. It’s the only sensible path to take, people!
Will Preston is a freelance writer from Portsmouth. He writes for various blogs (including his own website) and makes short films.
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