Winchester

Winchester (2018)

Dir. The Spierig Brothers

Written by Tom Vaughan, The Spierig Brothers

Starring, what the absolute fuck, Dame Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, Sarah Snook, Eamon Farren

Yes, yes, I know everyone in the world said this was absolute garbage. But come on, look at the ingredients here! First and foremost, of course, we get the tantalizing prospect of Academy-award winner and grand duchess of acting Helen Mirren slumming it up in some dumbass haunted house thriller. I know, I know, it’s not like she exactly has an untrammeled record of high class prestige films. She has NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS, THE NUTCRACKER AND THE FOUR REALMS, and three separate –and counting!—FAST AND FURIOUS movies on her resume, along with THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE and THE QUEEN and GOSFORD PARK and all that. Hell, she’s in a 2005 DTV Cuba Gooding Jr. crime thriller. But still, of all the Oscar winners I’ve encountered shamelessly slumming in lowbrow horror fare for a quick paycheck –and there have been a lot this year, including Jack Palance, Martin Landau (twice!), Jose Ferrer, Dorothy Malone, and Joan Crawford—Mirren still seems like the most unlikely, and certainly the one least in need of this kind of garbage. Horror gets them all eventually; either before their star has risen (a young DiCaprio in CRITTERS 3) or as their career starts to flag (Ray Milland in THE PYJAMA [sic] GIRL CASE), but seldom indeed does horror come calling in the middle of what is, to all appearances, a career as vital and productive as it has ever been. It’s a truly befuddling decision, but obviously I’m all for it (just as I was for Octavia Spencer’s recent horror pivot in MA), even if I can’t claim to understand it. It feels like we won, somehow. We got her!

And then, as if that wasn’t enough, you’ve also got Jason Clarke (LAWLESS), Eamon Farren (Twin Peaks: The Return) and Sarah Snook (JESSABELLE, Succession), the latter of whom we last encountered absolutely slaying it in PREDESTINATION, a film directed by these very same Spierig Brothers who serve as directors here! The same Spierig Brothers, in fact, who were kinda on a roll for a little while, with 2003’s UNDEAD, 2009’s DAYBREAKERS, and 2014’s PREDESTINATION all turning out to be remarkably delightful genre fare (I’m not really a SAW guy but it seems like people mostly agreed their 2017 JIGSAW was OK, not great). So that’s a winning team already assembled, and on top of that, you can add a splendid premise: it’s a film about the famous Winchester Mystery House, a topic which has always intrigued me and seems like it should all be itself be unique and colorful enough to fuel a solid gothic horror flick. Oh, and I even like the poster, which has an appreciably stark, evocative M.C. Escher look (see above). This movie really seems to have everything going for it, I mean, how could it not be grea… oh crap.

To the surprise of no one, I can now add my own voice to an essentially unanimous consensus that there is definitely a way for this to not be great, and that way is the one you can see on-screen. There is initially reason for hope, though; the location footage of the house itself is quite lovely (the film was shot by Spierig regular Ben Nott, who also deserves a mention for shooting 24 HOURS TO LIVE) and makes it seems like it’s at least going to be a classy Victorian affair with an interesting setting (in both the house itself and sunny, tropical California/Melbourne locale, an unusually bright and lush milieu for a horror movie even under perpetually troubled gray skies). Stately Victorian-Gothic haunted house flicks are not exactly a surefire guarantee of white-knuckled terror (let alone entertainment), but at least we don’t get very many of them, and this one seems to have a can’t-miss premise.

…which is then almost immediately missed, first with some eye-rolling clichés (Jason Clarke is –and you won’t believe this!—a guy haunted by grief following the death of a loved one!) which quickly give way to a stultifying death march of agonizingly rote jump-scares, and not even that many of them.* Amazingly, even that wasn’t enough to immediately tamp down my at-this-point wholly inexplicable optimism. That’s partially because the first jump-scare, at least, is the final flourish of a rather nicely staged little sequence of coquettish misdirection, and it gave me false hope about the level of effort that was going to go into them. But if I found myself in a remarkably lenient mood towards this kind of chicanery, it’s also because I swear to god, I discovered that in this age of gloomy, dour A24 “post-horror” mopefests, encountering a corny old boo! jump-scare was like running into an old friend. Aww, buddy, how long’s it been? It feels like I haven’t seen you in ages!

Unfortunately, after a warm reunion, it quickly became clear that this was more like running into an old friend you haven’t seen in ages, and then, after 5 minutes of talking to them, remembering that the reason why you haven’t seen them in ages is because they’re intolerably annoying. Right, there was a reason this kind of hacky business was wisely and correctly cast out of society. It’s unendurable. But the five minutes of fond nostalgia was fun while it lasted.

There’s not too much to say about the plot, which is, like the setting, both inscrutably complicated and functionally useless. Let’s just say that it feels self-consciously compelled to introduce far too many characters and plot twists and backstory for a narrative which basically boils down to “there is a haunted house and Helen Mirren is there.” There is one pretty charming twist involving the identity of the villain, exactly the kind of empty-headed but gleeful silliness which could have made for a fun romp. But unfortunately the script mostly takes itself exceedingly seriously. Much more so than I would have imagined possible for something which features a haunted roller skate. In fact, it generally seems to unwisely, --disastrously, in fact-- believe itself to be yet another weepy, dismal metaphor for dealing with grief, which is a dire mode for the Spierig Brothers, who are at their best with zippy, high-concept entertainment and have –to their credit, I suppose—no patience whatsoever for lugubrious atmospherics. They seem openly bored with the grinding slow build, whooshing around the camera impatiently and itching to get to the next setpiece. Except, with this lame script (which they co-wrote it, so they’re not entirely off the hook**) there is no next setpiece. All you have to look forward to is the next jump scare with a loud musical sting. It’s a bad fit between filmmakers and material (not that Kubrick himself would be able to squeeze much atmospheric dread from this limp, dusty ol’ lemon of a screenplay), though I guess given the two bad options available to them, going for hoary whammy instead of mannered gloom was the more honorable decision. And it does kind of pay off in the ending, which takes a direction so amazingly boneheaded it tilts towards active parody, and might actually get there if it wasn’t also so boring. Not that their commitment to frothy entertainment pans out at all, but at least it’s sprightlier than it would be if it was a Blumhouse or A24 production. That’s something

I should also, I guess, mention that the movie really seems to think it’s about guns or something – the Winchester of the title is, of course, the abode of Sarah Winchester, widow of William Wirt Winchester, heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and her hauntings are said to be the result of all the death brought on by those repeating arms. She goes on and on about this in a perfectly workable American accent. “You - feel responsible for the misuse of your product?” Asks Clarke. “If a weapon works as intended, one can hardly call it a misuse,” she responds, frostily. When complimented on her “superior” rifles, she retorts that they’re superior at “Killing. Indiscriminate killing. Very superior.” It’s not exactly subtle. So you figure, sure, mean ol’ liberal Hollywood hates the Constitution and wants to take your guns, fine, whatever. But here’s the weird thing. SPOILERS SPOILERS at the end, you know how they defeat the evil ghost? Fuckin’ shoot him with a magic gun! Firearms: The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. I can’t tell if this is, like, deliberate subversion of Winchester’s anti-gun policy, or if this script was just written by lazy idiots who didn’t realize they completely negate their point. I guess it doesn’t matter though because guess what, we’re not getting rid of the guns, it just ain’t gonna happen. If Helen Mirren being haunted is the price we have to pay to keep guns to protect ourselves from asshole ghosts, Americans are willing to pay that price. END SPOILERS

Anyway, with a paper-thin story, you’re really gonna need the actors to carry a movie, and maybe that’s what the Spierigs were counting on, because they definitely got some ringers. But alas, here we learn once again that professional acting is simply not something which greatly benefits an otherwise threadbare genre movie. Mirren is perfectly adequate in a very dumb and exposition-heavy role, but honestly not doing anything appreciably different than any normal professional old lady actor could give you. And it wouldn’t really matter if she was; this role could be played by Tara Reid in an Andy Warhol wig and it would amount to about the same thing. In fact, it would almost certainly be better just by virtue of being something. Clarke, who is capable of being exceedingly good but just as often seems to vanish into the background, at least brings a sort of weird detached annoyance to his role, which is something, although maybe just what he was feeling at having to read these dumbass lines. Sarah Snook, so terrific in PREDESTINATION, is criminally wasted on a useless nothing of a character, though I guess you could argue the Spierigs just wanted to throw some work her way. Fair enough, the poor lady’s gotta eat while she waits for Hollywood to set her loose on something worthy of her talents.

Anyway, the whole thing is kinda a waste, in fact it’s almost amazing how completely it fails to make anything of the bounty of potential it assembles. It just goes to show you, you can get together the right ingredients, but you still have to BOO!!

Ha, got you. See, that shit’s still fun. Once.

* “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." "Yeah, I know; and such small portions!”

** Although I have a suspicion they re-wrote it from a previous script by Tom Vaughn (Wesley Snipe’s UNSTOPPABLE), and basically just added the four or five fun parts.

               

 

Haha, wow. Surely whatever they paid her wasn't worth being implicated this graphic design nightmare.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	Inspired By True Events At The Most Haunted House In History. Also, the much better Terror Is Building
TITLE ACCURACY	There are both a house and a character by that name.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA/ Australia
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted House, Period Horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Man, I still can’t believe I have to type the words “Helen Mirren” in here.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Spierig Brothers? Not an icon, I guess, but I will always think fondly of them for DAYBREAKERS and PREDISTINATION
NUDITY?	There might be, like, a boob early on? I think Jason Clarke is in a bordello type opium house at one point. I dunno. It’s PG-13, anyway.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yup
POSSESSION?	You betcha
CREEPY DOLLS?	I wanna say no? But if so it’s the only haunted house cliché they left out.
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Yes, except it’s one of those madnesses where it turns out it was actually ghosts
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	You can assemble all the right ingredients, but you still need an actual movie.

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw III (1990)

Dir. Jeff Burr

Written by David J. Schow

Starring Kate Hodge, William Butler, Ken Foree, Viggo Mortensen, R. A. Milhailoff

            Rummaging through obscure old genre movies is like prospecting for hidden treasure; you can set yourself up in a likely spot, you can search as much ground as possible to increase your odds, but in the end, you still have to get lucky. There’s no substitute for luck. Every once in awhile, you turn up a pretty good one (THE NEST), sometimes you get something useless but singular enough to be interesting (THE AMERICAN SCREAM) and mostly you just get disappointing nothings (THE BLOODYJUDGE). This is especially true for old horror movies, since horror fans are among the least discriminating people on planet Earth and also watch 500% more movies than normal humans. Consequently if there’s anything worthwhile there, it’s usually been discovered long ago. So not only is the prize you seek already exceedingly rare, you’re covering terrain which has already been thoroughly traversed and minutely prospected by fellow travelers. Sometimes, then, your best hope is not that the gold you’re panning for is so obscure as to have never before been seen, but that is has been widely seen, but somehow missed and overlooked, misjudged, misunderstood.

This can happen sometimes; occasionally, a film just happens to be wrong for its time; it’s roundly criticized and dismissed in the moment, only to be rediscovered a generation later with the benefit of time and distance to help the world see subtler charms which were missed by contemporary eyes that expected something else. This is an especially likely fate for offbeat cult genre movies that have even a hint of marquee appeal -- something that draws an audience with disastrously erroneous expectations upon its release, and can never overcome the initial negativity generated by the shock and revulsion that follows from the wrong eyes seeing something they were never meant to see. We talked about this phenomenon back when we discussed Nic Roeg’s EUREKA, a nutty, impressionistic art movie with the gall to try to lure in the normies by casting Gene Hackman and fraudulently passing itself off as some kind of whodunnit.* Some poor suburban dad with a vague memory of liking THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE is not gonna get the fun night at the movies he was hoping for.

Obviously nobody who gets hustled that way is going to come away happy, and generating such universal ill-will so early in a movie’s life is often sufficient to drive away the very people who should see it, dooming a film to immediate and unexamined obscurity. This is obviously a bad PR strategy for the movie in question, but it’s the perfect method of preserving a time capsule for future generations to discover --the cinematic equivalent of getting a mosquito caught in amber-- because it’s one of the few ways to bury a movie so deep and ignominiously that even connoisseurs will fail to unearth it for decades to come. Heck, even Tobe Hooper’s insane TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 suffered a little from this fate; turning his bleak, grueling horror classic into a outrageous campy comedy was not what fans of the first film were expecting in 1986, and you can still find people even today who dismiss it offhand (most have not seen it recently, or they’d have changed their minds). My point is, these things are out there, ready to be recovered, reevaluated, and burnished to their original glory in the eyes of the world.

Alas, LEATHERFACE: TEXAS CHAINSAW III is not such a film.  

Anyway, I can’t say they didn’t warn me. Nobody has ever claimed that LEATHERFACE; TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III was any damn good at all, and if even 1% of humans were capable of enjoying it, I’d have heard from one of them by now. But even so, I dunno, you look at it on paper and think come on, it’s got fucking Viggo Mortensen and Ken Foree, and the absolute greatest fucking trailer in film history how could this not be at least a little entertaining? And here’s the thing: it is a little entertaining. But here’s also the thing: it’s only a little entertaining. It’s not even some kind of EXORCIST 2 style ambitious wrongheaded hubrisical catastrophe, it’s just the most milquetoast final product you could possibly imagine having the words “Chainsaw massacre” in its title. Or even “Texas,” for that matter. It’s mostly not bad, it’s mostly just nothing. Which unfortunately is just about the most unforgivable sin a movie with “Chainsaw Massacre” in its title could possible commit.

It’s not utterly bereft of merit, however; especially early on, there seems like there might be some hope. After a pretty middling re-introduction to Leatherface (now portrayed by R. A. Milhailoff, a former pro-wrestler and one time Full House guest star) and his penchant for bludgeoning young women and wearing their faces, we meet our ostensible protagonists, Michelle (Kate Hodge, THE HIDDEN II) and Ryan (William Butler, FRIDAY THE 13th PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD, writer of THE GINGERDEAD MAN), who the film treats with the exact maximum possible level of resigned acceptance at the necessity of having a couple of victims in a script. But we also waste little time getting to the obligatory TCSM pervy weirdos, first the handsome and apparently harmless Tex (Viggo Mortensen, RENNY HARLIN’S PRISON), and then the less appealing Bible-fixated peeping-tom Alfredo (Tom Everett, a career which has taken him from DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN to THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON**).

These early scenes don’t really work, but they do vaguely hint at why you might imagine director Jeff Burr (STEPFATHER II, PUMPKINHEAD 2: BLOOD WINGS, PUPPETMASTER 4, PUPPETMASTER 5, THE WEREWOLF REBORN!) would not be the worst choice in the world for a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie. Or at least, they might, if you’d seen what appears to be his one and only watchable horror movie, 1987’s FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM, a surprising and disquieting anthology film long on uneasy atmosphere and Southern Gothic flavor. The original TCSM and its sequel are more geek show than Flannery O’Connor, but one could dimly imagine Burr recapturing that timeless, stagnating sense of baking sun and decaying sanity and successfully applying it to the debauched world of the Sawyer clan. And in fact, it sounds like that might have been exactly what he intended to do; he wanted to shoot in 16mm, in Texas, and to make it as twisted and grimy as possible.

 But, as you can read in this career-spanningand dream-crushing interview, he had good intentions often, but never the clout to actually make them a reality. In this case, he was hired on at the last minute, with the script already in place, the set already built in California, and a premier date already announced, and that was that. It would not be shot in 16mm, would not be shot in Texas, and would not contain any twist or grime that could feasibly be avoided. New Line, fresh off the underwhelming NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET  5: THE DREAM CHILD and hoping to replace their flagging horror property with a new franchise, would be calling the shots, and, as Burr points out, the final product of that kind of corporate thinking could only be a corporate movie. Which LEATHERFACE indisputably is, and which is the one thing a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie must indisputably never be. It smacks of a film made by responsible, sane people who are just trying to show the kids a good time, and consequently it is irrecoverably hobbled right from the gate. It’s about as perverse and shocking as a Disneyland ride.

So instead of a continuation of the maggot-brained intensity of Tobe Hooper’s two TCSM movies, instead we get a movie which looks and feels like a pretty generic low-budget slasher which would be shot in California and lazily rip off THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. And as far as that genre goes, it’s by no means the worst; I mean, it looks like it was shot by professionals, there’s some production value in there, a couple attempts at some gimmicks. Leatherface drives a jacked up monster truck covered with human skin, for example, which is about as deeply stupid as movies get, but the kind of stupid that’s at least trying to be fun. He also gets a tricked-out chainsaw with the words “The Saw is Family” engraved on the side, which I’m just now realizing is probably a play on “The Sawyer Family,” which is actually kind of funny. Ken Fornee shows up as some kind of survivalist militia guy, I guess, which explains why he has the weapons and wherewithal to actually do battle with the offending backwoods people-eaters. And in the movie’s most interesting idea, they introduce a cute little daughter for the family, who uses a desiccated baby corpse as a doll and gets spoiled and doted on by the older maniacs who are trying to murder up some dinner. Obvious, perhaps, but pleasingly grotesque.

That stuff by itself seems like it should be more than enough to add up to a movie, and yet it somehow doesn’t ever quite seem to make the impact it should. Part of that, no doubt, is the squeamishness of the MPAA, which in the late 80s and early 90s was uniquely merciless to horror films. Consequently, the biggest massacre anywhere in sight is what the MPAA did to it, cutting it to absolute ribbons in order to dodge an unreleasable “X” rating. They might’ve just as well used a chainsaw. Certainly what they did to the film was vastly more brutal than anything the characters ever do on-screen. Numerous shots, and even whole scenes, furtively cut away before anything really awful can happen, deftly refuting any halfhearted claims the film might float to bolster its dubious titular claims. That’s partially a result of the dozens of re-edits, of course; supposedly the film was re-submitted a record 11 times before it got its “R” rating, which would be a badge of honor except that the final product is so mild-mannered. But it’s also just that the movie was kind of a pussycat to begin with. All those cuts definitely didn’t help, but it’s not like it began as an extreme, brutal film only to have all the gore cut out in post; it was always going to be a pretty inoffensive movie, made with with the looming specter of a ratings challenge in mind. And then the MPAA gutted even that. There’s a couple additional moments of blood in the “unrated” cut I saw, but nothing even remotely shocking.*** Even the deleted original ending is barely more nihilistic than a given episode of The Twilight Zone, and not a squib more violent, either.****

So while it would be easy to pin the wholesale failure of the movie on its tortured crucible of ratings-hunting, I can’t really do it. There’s something else missing here. After all, the original TCSM isn’t fundamentally some kind of wall-to-wall gorefest either -- the sequence here wherein our heroine has her hands nailed to a chair and then rips them free is easily as explicitly violent as anything that happens in the original (irony noted: Hooper also tried to avoid explicit violence in the hopes of getting a safer rating -- in his case, an unrealistic PG instead of an R). So it’s not really the violence that’s missing, it’s something more ineffable. It’s the sense of sleaze, of sun-baked dirt and sweat, of decay, of impenetrable, incomprehensible, almost Lovecraftian madness. Hell, it’s the Texas. You miss the Texas. Even inside the Sawyer house, there’s not a frame of this movie that doesn’t have California written on it. And a rather cheap, perfunctory sort of California, at that. Burr and cinematographer James L. Carter (ONE FALSE MOVE) appear utterly incapable of staging anything to convey that they find any of this any more shocking or debased than your average marquee slasher, lighting the movie like a sitcom and framing even the most disturbing content with a listless disinterest. The title character is wearing a mask made from crudely skinned human flesh for the entire movie, but you’d never know this was in any way unusual behavior from the way the movie presents it. It’s there, but the movie makes nothing of it, and in doing so actively diminishes it. It hardly seems possible to take such inherently salacious material and render it so low-impact, but here we are.*****

There’s simply nothing in evidence here which would suggest why anyone involved thought this should be made, what was supposed to be good here. The best it can do is to settle on dimly reminding you of its more formidable predecessors. So it doesn’t really tell a story so much as it checks boxes. You gotta have the chainsaw in there, for example, so there’s a scene with a chainsaw. Now, nothing interesting or memorable happens with that chainsaw, but it’s in there, so it technically qualifies as a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie from a legal standpoint. I mean, you’ve got everything you would want in a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie in there; chainsaw, family dinner scene, creepy hitchhiker who turns out to be in on it, old grandpa propped up at the family table. The ingredients are there, it’s just that not only are none of them even remotely the kind of escalation you’d need by a third sequel to a iconic classic, but they’re also just milder and blander and phonier and more insubstantial in every conceivable way. It’s a movie which seems confused by its own existence, like a stagehand hanging out backstage who suddenly gets grabbed and shoved out in front of an audience by some banker hissing “do it like that other one!”

Which I guess is kinda what happened.

 * ONLY GOD FORGIVES would be a good modern example: a lot of well-meaning respectable citizens saw that trailer and said, “hey there, Martha, that cute young fella you liked so much in THE NOTEBOOK did some kind of  kung fu movie, how ‘bout we make a date night of it?” Most of them will never recover.

**He also plays a character named “Sargent Pepper” in DANCES WITH WOLVES, and that’s a true story.

*** Viggo Mortensen gets to die twice, which is an improvement from his baffling off-screen implied death in the theatrical version. Neither death is any good at all, and his second death is so badly lit that it’s almost indecipherable and was probably cut for clarity rather than delicacy, but I guess that’s a net gain in quantity-over-quality sort of way.

 **** Though it is a vast, vast improvement on the comically nonsensical theatrical ending tacked on by the producers without Burr’s involvement after the only thing test audiences seemed to remember is they liked Ken Foree, who we’re now inexplicably told has survived having his skull sawed open and his body laying submerged in a fetid swamp for several hours. Not that realism is exactly high on a list of my priorities for these movies, but it is at this point that we exit “horror movie logic” and enter the “Bugs Bunny cartoon” universe.

 ***** Alternate take: Here’s the only positive review of the movie I've ever heard of, and it still spends half the review talking about all the things that went wrong with the production, before making a long series of absolutely bewildering claims ("It makes Leatherface scary again!") as if they're established facts.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	The Terror Begins the Second It Starts, which is technically true, I guess, since we’re introduced in the midst of a different Chainsaw Massacre which has immediately preceded the one we will be observing.
TITLE ACCURACY	I mean, Leatherface is pretty prominent, they say it’s Texas even though it’s clearly not, there is a chainsaw, and if killing two people counts as a massacre, then sure. Actually come to think of it, the Sawyers take worse than they give here, so maybe the massacre is what happens to them.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	Yes, the third sequel of four in the original continuity (we don’t talk about the remake continuity around here)
REMAKE?	Not specifically, although I think with the prequel and everything the remake continuity is up to part 3 by now. Oops, I just broke the one rule I established regarding this issue. Forget I said anything
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Cannibals, slashers
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Ken Foree. I guess R. A. Milhailoff counts?
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals that I recall.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	Yes, the little girl has a baby-doll made from a child’s corpse, which, man, that’s so fucked up, I honestly don’t understand how the movie makes it seem like such a mild detail.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Yeah, I’d say so
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Definitely, in fact the first creep we encounter has precisely this desire.
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you absolutely must do battle with a clan of inbred cannibal psycho killers, you could absolutely do worse than running into Ken Foree for backup.

And barely a C-, but still technically proficient enough to save itself from a "D"