Family Blood

Family Blood (2018)

Dir Sonny Mallhi

Written by Vinessa Shaw, Sonny Mallhi

Starring Vinessa Shaw, James Ransone, Colin Ford

           

            It was only recently that it dawned on me that the modern wave of gloomy, glacial, uneventful indie horror films was the natural replacement for the waning fad of found-footage. Before FAMILY BLOOD, I kind of took it for granted that the recent wave of “Post-horror” films (as the movement was patronizingly dubbed by The Guardian), about which I wrote at length in my review of HEREDITARY, were, if maybe a bit misguided, at least in earnest. I might prefer a genre film that has some actual entertaining qualities to a film which is basically a slow-motion family drama with a scary soundtrack, but I assumed, mostly due to their cultural ascendancy in the last few years, that at least some people must feel otherwise. That these films were being made by people who wanted to make them and were expressing their own artistic inclination, misguided as they might be.

            Recent events, though, suggests a rather more disturbing possibility. After all, while the found-footage craze might have started with something of a formalist experiment, it flourished as producers noticed they could be made for almost nothing. Likewise, I suddenly wondered, what if the the “post-horror” wave *began* innocently, with a handful of indie wunderkinds paying tribute to DON’T LOOK NOW, but arrived as a movement for rather more sinister reasons, as producers suddenly caught on that audiences would pay for genre movies with literally no genre content at all, if they could pass themselves off as tasteful. I bet they didn’t even mind re-hiring the cinematographers “found-footage” had put out of a job, because you can shoot a perfectly professional-looking movie on a fucking iPhone now. And besides, it’s not the crew that ends up costing money: it’s the content. Found-footage was cheap because it made things so visibly illegible that you didn’t have to cough up a lot of dough for monster costumes or fake beheadings. The revelation producers had with “Post-horror” is that you don’t even have to hide your lack of content, as long as you dress it up as art.  

            I mean, how else to explain a movie as stunningly empty as FAMILY BLOOD? I refuse, refuse flat out, to believe this is a movie anyone wanted to make. This is not the kind of thing that artists make. Artists might make bad art sometimes, but even the worst of it at least betrays some flicker of human intent. This is not even the kind of thing exploitation producers used to make back in the grindhouse days to snag lowest-common denominator dollars. Those could also be bad, but at least they grasped that the point --however poorly-executed that might be in practice-- was entertainment. Maybe they didn’t have the budget to show you tits and gore and explosions, but they at least understood that’s what you would want to see. Even the most impoverished, indolent, artistically bankrupt shot-in-the-Philippines 1970s T&A trash would never dream of releasing a movie as openly unrewarding as this, and certainly no filmmaker with even a glimmer of artistic ambition would bother with something so flimsy. No, this is a movie that could only have been made for the Netflix era, that brief period in history when art was being produced not for the artist or for the audience, but for an algorithm. This is a movie made because Netflix must have content, dammit, and it really doesn’t matter what that content is, specifically, and it doesn’t matter one iota if anyone actually enjoys it, or for that matter if anyone even watches it. It just has to exist. It has to be there, so that the mathematically relevant demographics can see that they have a disorienting surfeit of content to select from, even if they would never even entertain the idea of actually selecting most of it.

            That does, unfortunately, necessitate that if this thing gets accidentally clicked on, 90 minutes of images will follow. And for some reason, I called their bluff and watched that 90 minutes. In it, director Sonny Mallhi (a producer of middlebrow horror trash and remakes going back to 2006’s THE LAKE HOUSE) and co-writer Nic Savvides propose an amazing, never-before considered high-concept hook: what if --and stay with me here—we did a vampire film, but it was a metaphor for addiction? Truly, a groundbreaking notion which has only ever been explored previously in every other vampire film ever made. But that’s not quite the whole concept, because Mallhi and Savvides came up with a crafty twist on the old canard, and amended their conceit thusly: what if we did a vampire film, but it was a metaphor for addiction, and then we took out the part where the vampires did things?

            I mean, give them this, at least; they really do put the “post” in “post-horror.” This is a movie about a vaguely-defined divorcee (Vinessa [sic] Shaw, THE HILLS HAVE EYES REMAKE, holy cow, EYES WIDE SHUT) with two kids (Colin Ford, UNDER THE DOME and Eloise Lushina, GRAYBEARD) who has been an addict. She was an addict, and she is currently in an AA-like recovery group, and that is literally as far as the movie cares to go in terms of characterization. Alas, on her way home from a meeting, somebody offers her drugs, and so obviously she takes them –I mean, what are you gonna do, refuse pills offered to you in public by some degenerate, slurring stranger? That would be rude-- and zones out in a public park, which leaves her open to vampire attack courtesy of this guy Christopher (James Ransone, The Wire, SINISTER) who converts her to vampirism, basically because he wants a girlfriend. So the rest of the movie is about her starting to crave blood and act like an addict, because you see, this is a metaphor for addiction, except not really since it actually establishes her as an addict in the text itself. So it’s not so much a metaphor as just a movie about an addict, except blood instead of crack or whatever so that we can sell it as a genre movie because let’s face it, nobody on Earth is going to be interested in this basic-ass addiction drama otherwise.

            You might think there’s more, but that’s it! She’s just an addict, and she does addict things, and her kids get angsty about her being an addict, and her new boyfriend shows her the lifestyle on account of her being an addict. That is the entire plot. Eventually the fact that Addict #1 is addict-y becomes a little too monotonous even for this movie, and the focus shifts to her son, who has to come to terms with the fact that mom is an addict. But it’s not like he’s any more complex or interesting than his mom, it’s still just a bedrock-basic, Lifetime Original Movie addiction drama except with vampires, except without vampires because almost everything interesting happens off-screen. Seriously; there’s eventually even a superpowered vampire fight, and it happens off screen. THIS AIN’T A FUCKIN’ VAL LEWTON PICTURE YOU DIPSHITS. THIS IS A VISUAL MEDIUM. SHOW ME SOMETHING.

            There are perhaps two brief but adequate spooky/stalking sequences in there, and it does get a little bit violent at the very, very end, but there’s just no movie here. This is insipid drama, and barely even horror at all. The cast mostly isn’t actively bad, but these characters are so wafer-thin that even calling them “characters” feels like a misnomer, and nobody here manages to even come close to overcoming that handicap. Even Ransone’s usual livewire nervous energy is quashed almost to nothing (it looks like he was cast entirely on the strength of vaguely resembling Jack Gyllenhall and then given the exclusive direction to “brood more”). In fact, despite being technically much more competent than many movies I watched this October, it managed to avoid the dreaded “unwatchable garbage” tag almost exclusively for the 2-4 seconds of twitchy oddness that Ransone manages to get through. There are worse movies in the world, but there can’t be many that manage to do less with what they have. WINTERBEAST may be terrible, but by God at least it tries to entertain. FAMILY BLOOD chooses not to. I would say that’s because it’s pretentious hipster faux horror that thinks entertaining is beneath it, but I don’t even believe that. I think they just figured they could get by without trying. Pretension is one thing; hell, even contempt is one thing. This just feels like not giving a shit.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	Even a tagline would require more effort than this movie has in it.
TITLE ACCURACY	Family, check, blood, check.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampire, “post-horror”
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Both Shaw and Ransone have dabbled in horror, but I wouldn’t call them icons.
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Animals end up getting attacked rather than the other way around
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Vampire!
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Human into vampire
VOYEURISM?	Nothing much, although I guess you could say than Christopher has been watching the family.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Horror movies which have metaphors are better than “horror” movies which are only metaphors.

Sodoma's Ghost

I do have to say, this poster is pretty baller. They should have used this for THE KEEP.

Sodoma’s Ghost (1988)

Dir. Lucio Fulci

Written by Lucio Fulci, Carlo Alberto Alfieri

Starring Claudio Aliotti, Maria Concetta Salieri, Robert Egon, Al Cliver

Well, one minute and 30 seconds into SODOMA’s GHOST, including credits (which play over stygian blackness in total silence) we’ve got a Nazi cocaine orgy. Unfortunately it’s the same Nazi orgy I already saw in CAT IN THE BRAIN, which blunts a little bit of the shock value they were probably counting on here. And in CAT IN THE BRAIN you also had the added bonus of watching director Lucio Fulci intensely staring at everything from behind the camera, which gave it a little more pizzazz. But still, Nazi coke orgy! I guess that lets you know what kind of party it’s gonna be right off the bat, anyway. Six minutes later it’s still going. Finally, a Nazi shoots a pool ball into a reposing woman’s vagina, and there’s an explosion, and then we’re on to the actual plot. Which is not exactly as severe a pivot as you might assume, because that plot turns out to also be mostly porn, and a lot of it with Nazis, though admittedly the beginning is the only orgy. I realize that to the casual filmgoer, the idea that a movie could just unexpectedly turn out to be Nazi porn* seems even more alien than the idea that you could unintentionally stumble upon the same Nazi porn twice, but I assure you that in the particular cultural beat I report on, this is an ever-present possibility and you just have to learn to roll with it. Well, this is no time to self-reflect about the genre I’ve spent my life studying, come on guys let’s move on nothing to see here.

Once we’ve established the narratively “vital” fact that there is this Italian villa where one time there was a Nazi coke orgy, we’re introduced to the six blandest actors in Italy as they arrive at the very same Nazi villa in modern times, and find it deserted. They hang out there, and one of them has a Nazi S&M dream. Then they leave. And then they come back, and this time they find they can’t leave, the doors and windows are locked (and can’t be broken open). So they prattle obnoxiously at each other for awhile. This takes up roughly 50 minutes of an 84 minute movie. Finally, at 50 minutes, some kind of horror part starts to kick in; it seems there’s an evil, possibly Nazi, ghost and/or ghosts in the house that can tempt you by showing you things in a mirror. “Things” which, in every case, turn out to be boobs. There are endless, endless amounts of boobs in this movie (every female cast member gets topless, with no exceptions) and although this is an admittedly friendly gesture on the part of the movie, it gets old pretty fast when you’re hoping for some kind of horror. Plenty of hustling genre movies try to hedge their bets by dumping a bunch of softcore nonsense into the inevitable downtime that arises from the necessity of putting something on-screen for a minimum of 75 minutes, but this seems like a case where they started to shoot some filler nudity and then just got distracted and kept shooting more and more and then forgot to go back and add the genre stuff. I’m unclear if the Nazis are able to tempt you with other things too, and it just never occurs to them to try. But at any rate, boobs seem to consistently do the trick, so why mess with a winning strategy?

There are literally almost no screenshots from this movie that can be posted unedited on a wholesome family site like this one.

Director Lucio Fulci  (ZOMBI 2, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, THE BEYOND, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE NEW YORK RIPPER, CAT IN THE BRAIN, DOOR INTO SILENCE) is one of those slippery genre auteurs who is justifiably ranked with the greats, but did not exactly have an unimpeachable track record of quality. Probably his most widely recognizable auteurial trademark is that his films have boldly nonsensical, haphazard narratives redeemed by a few absolutely stellar setpieces. It’s been maybe a decade since I’ve seen it, but my recollection is that even his arguably most famous film, ZOMBI 2, is almost entirely absolutely unwatchable dreck except that it also happens to have maybe the three best zombie gore scenes ever put on celluloid. That forgives a lot -- and to be a Fulci fan is inherently to forgive a lot-- but SODOMA’S GHOST is, regrettably, almost entirely unwatchable dreck, minus any of the good parts.

But even this deep into his late-career decline, Fulci was still Fulci, and so, from about minute 50 to minute 60, suddenly Fulci the thriller director, not Fulci the softcore porn director, turns up out of the blue. For a hot moment, things get inexplicably good, with a disquieting, intense Russian Roulette sequence, a surreal walk through an impressionistically lit house with unsourced, untranslated German being shouted from somewhere, and a crazy sex nightmare which ends with the guy grabbing his paramore's boobs, only to find they're filled with decay and maggots. They follow that up by dragging the guy’s body downstairs, where it suddenly starts decaying really disgustingly while the camera digs in close to check out the gnarly detail. Granted, that may not sound like a universally appealing description of a fun night at the movies, but at least it’s making some effort. Stephen King famously said, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out.” Nothing in this movie was ever going to terrify or horrify, but at least going for the gross-out means they were trying.

Anyway, starting right at minute 50 there’s a legitimately functional 10 minute stretch of a movie which otherwise barely has a worthwhile 10 seconds. It’s enough to get your hopes up that maybe the movie will manage to stick the landing and redeem itself. Alas, immediately thereafter the Fulci who cares checks out again, and things settle right back into the previously established standard routine of people taking their tops off and having sinister Germans offer them more boobs through a mirror, none of which really goes anywhere (for example, there's a long scene where a topless German woman makes a lesbian think her girlfriend is getting it on with another girl, but then she storms downstairs to catch them and they’re not, so nothing happens with that. Not sure why someone felt it was worth including in a movie).

As the MIRROR MIRROR series unequivocally demonstrated, evil mirrors are not exactly the stuff of gripping cinema. Nazis have a slightly better track record, as least as far as sleazy genre entertainment goes, so no real surprise, then, that the best part (of a movie almost entirely lacking in good parts) is Robert Egon (“Italian Street Boy” in MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, “Perfect Young Italian” [seriously] in 1990’s CAPTAIN AMERICA) as the young Nazi who is filming the orgy (not participating) and shows up to tempt two of our “heroes” in the present. He has an arresting presence, half smug Aryan malice and half infuriatingly mild politeness. I prefer the idea that he’s not a Nazi at all, but rather some sort of ancient spirit in the house which got to the venal Nazis even more than he’s able to with the horny teens. There’s never anything specific to suggest that, but if there’s anything at all interesting about the movie, it’s the inhuman, opaque quality of the antagonists, which Egon embodies best. Most ghost stories are fundamentally built around the mystery of who the ghosts were and what they want. Here, that question is never raised, and the answer never appears. Do they want, like, revenge, or corruption of the innocent, or what? Does their being Nazis and trying to seduce the youth read like a metaphor? The movie never even seems aware that you might have these questions, which is certainly a symptom of its abject idiotic incompetence more than its narrative boldness, but at least the effect is a little exotic. Anyway, Egon’s only really in two scenes, which is a shame since the whole climax could really use him.

Speaking of which, the climax is such a wispy bit of tired nothing that it feels wrong to even describe it with that term, but I do sort of like the film’s final, insipid twist of a coda. (SPOILERS) See, it turns out that after a long night of obnoxious arguing and death and boobs and Nazis, everyone just… wakes up on the lawn, apparently having dreamed the whole thing! They just laugh it off and drive away, and that’s the end of the movie! Obviously, an ending so amazingly corny and insulting has drawn quite a bit of ire over the years. And it’s not hard to see why; if you somehow managed the seemingly impossible feat of taking the movie seriously up to that point (and there’s certainly nothing in the movie itself which would suggest you aren’t meant to) one can well imagine how an ending this flagrantly dismissive would be an absolutely mortifying affront (see [SPOILERS for THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW]: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW). But I actually sort of enjoy the dorky, sincere niceness of it; you get the feeling Fulci ended up kinda liking these dumbass kids and wanting to give them a happy ending, especially after so many of them were nice enough to show him their tits. It’s sort of sweet, really, which is a weird and possibly psychotic thing to have to say about a movie which opens with a full five minutes of Nazi orgy, but here we are. And here we will leave it.

PS: I have no idea who Sodoma is.

Alternate take: “The problem with this movie is it’s just not sleazy enough. So, a sleazy Nazi film without sleaze? Yep, that’s all we have here. While it’s not entirely true that there’s no sleaze as actresses like to shuck their clothes to show us their very modest endowments – though most are small enough that it seems like Fulci did his casting calls at junior high schools – there’s no eroticism or sizzle with the sleaze. It just plain doesn’t feel sexy or even dirty.” --Cult Review’s “Perfesser Deviant” who probably needs to take a break from Italian movies for awhile.

* Hello there, Academy-Award-For-Best-Picture-Nominee THE READER.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	None, but with a title that lurid, what else do you need to say?
TITLE ACCURACY	Since I have no idea what it means, I can’t begin to tell you. There does seem to be one or more ghost, anyway.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted Houses, Nazis
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, but I do want to point out that Art Director Franco Vanorio performed the same duties on PIRANHA 2: THE SPAWNING, which means he worked with James Cameron.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Lucio Fulci behind the camera.
NUDITY?	Almost non-stop
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Probably, but if you didn’t stop reading at “Nazi coke orgy” I doubt anything else the movie can throw at you is going to upset you.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	Not really
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Yes
MORAL OF THE STORY	Whatever moral this movie is trying to get you to learn, I would resist it.

The Beast in The Cellar

The Beast in The Cellar (1970)

Dir and written by James Kelly

Starring Beryl Reid, Flora Robson, John Hamill, T. P. McKenna

Yeah, none of this is in the movie. And I don't know who those two young ladies in the corner are but they're definitely not our protagonists.

What we got here is a dishwater-dull entry into the “crazed-cannibal in the cellar” genre. Except without the part where the crazed cannibal does anything. There are a handful --maybe four or five at the very most-- of brief POV stalking scenes, which end abruptly with either A) a scream and a quick edit or B) completely indecipherable closeups and rapid editing of some kind of injury occurring, but completely obscuring precisely what is happening or what is causing it. This takes up maybe a generous 5-7 minutes of screentime total, and that’s all the crazed cannibal action you’re going to get. You should know that up front. This is not a movie with any good stuff in it. I already had my suspicions when I noticed it was a Tigon Production; as we all know, as far as British schlock studios go, Tigon was the poor man’s Amicus Productions, and Amicus was the poor man’s Hammer Productions, and Hammer was the poor man’s “a real film studio,” so this is pretty far down the line. Tigon did manage to produce a small handful of low-budget winners in the late 60’s and early 70’s (WITCHFINDER GENERAL, BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW) but the words “from the studio which brought you THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR” do not exactly inspire confidence that they’re working overly hard to entertain.

So yes, there IS a beast, of sorts, in the cellar. But the vast, vast majority of the movie is actually a two-person familial drama about two elderly sisters (Beryl Reid, THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU, THE DOCTOR AND THE DEVILS, and Flora Robson, BLACK NARCISSUS, CLASH OF THE TITANS) who drink tea and talk in a polite, roundabout way about how they fear someone or something they keep locked in the cellar may have been getting out and causing murders. That’s a solid 80% of the movie, right there. While there’s something kind of endearing about a exploitation genre movie which is almost entirely devoted to two older ladies drinking tea and elliptically speaking around any specific details about their past, it’s also absolutely unbearably dull going. I mean, Reid and Robson are both fine actresses, but this is not exactly gripping dialogue here. One scene finds a visiting soldier (John Hamill, the fantastic-sounding THE OVER-AMOROUS ARTIST) recounting, in almost word-for-word, beat-by-beat detail, every single moment from a scene that the audience watched in full not five minutes prior. He returns maybe five more times to similarly gripping results, and to have a baffling nonromance with a pretty young nurse (Tessa Wyatt, ENGLAND MADE ME)  who keeps being brought back into the story as if she’s eventually going to be important, but never turns out to be.

The explanation as to who or what is locked in the cellar doesn’t arrive until the very end, when one of the old ladies, more or less unprompted, relates what turns out to be a meandering, multi-generational family history in such a long-winded way that it appears day turns to night and even the police inspector learning the truth behind the sudden increase in mutilated corpses appearing in his district looks like he can barely keep his eyes open. Which would make sense, because of all the possible reasons to have a beast in the cellar you could possibly imagine, this has to be the single most uninteresting one the mind could devise. I’d spoil it for you but there’s not really a twist or anything to spoil, given that the explanation manages the amazing feat of being both utterly nonsensical and staggeringly boring. It does involve both World Wars, and the physical and psychological toll they took on those who fought in them, which sort of begs you to read this as some sort of allegory, but if that’s how it is intended it would take a more sophisticated scholar of wartime British history than I to parse it. If you’d like to try your hand at wrestling some meaning out of it, here are the pieces you’ve got to work with, boiled down from what seems like 90 minutes of exposition to four basic points (SPOILERS, obviously, not that this is really interesting enough to be spoiled):

1: The sisters are really into their Dad, and keep talking about how great and handsome he was to an uncomfortable degree, and I really assumed the “beast” was going to be the result of some sort of repressed incest incident. But nope. Instead: (SPOILERS CONTINUE)

2: Dad Went off to WWI, and they thought he had died. But then he came back but was physically and psychologically scarred and really kind of an asshole thereafter. But not enough so that they had to lock him up or anything, so he’s not the beast in the cellar. Just a dick. (SPOILERS CONTINUE)

3: They also had a younger brother, who for some reason Dad never liked. They really stress this point but it doesn’t matter because then Dad died of old age, and that was the end of that. Good thing we know his whole fucking life story now. (SPOILERS CONTINUE)

4: Then World War II came along, and, remembering the bad times their Dad experienced after the first World War, the sisters decided they didn’t want their brother to join the army, and figured it would be a better idea to just wall him up in the basement until he became a mindless cannibal. So they did. And that’s the story of the Beast In The Cellar. (END SPOILERS)

Obviously that feels like it should have some kind of subtextual interpretation about war, but whatever it’s supposed to be I can’t figure it out. Obviously war is bad, but maybe the point is that trying to prevent people from going to war is even worse? But even if that’s what the movie’s getting at, what real-world parallel does that have? The only thing I could come up with is maybe some kind of rebuke to Chamberlain and the pre-WWII Nazi appeasement crowd. But was there really much point in criticizing Chamberlain by fucking 1970? And even if there was, I don’t see how the actual Beast In The Cellar fits into that metaphor. What, Nazi appeasement turned the nation’s potential fighting force into insane, isolated cannibals? I don’t get it. Even at my most generous interpretation, it’s as shitty a metaphor as it is a movie, and it's 30 years too late to be relevant or even bold. Subtext rejected.

Anyway.

The movie briefly shows some flickers of life halfway through when one of the two old ladies has to try and cover things up by disposing of an inconvenient corpse with its eyeball hanging out. You don’t get to see too many horror movies where a polite old British lady has to awkwardly drag a mutilated corpse around, and I approve. But that’s only one scene and it’s indifferently executed. There are essentially no other entertaining scenes of any kind. A total anticlimax of an ending definitively puts the nail in the coffin, and firmly establishes this one as aggressive anti-entertainment, though kudos to the composer Tony Macaulay for really, really working hard to try and sell us on the idea that any of this is interesting. I mean, it’s a big, rich dramatic score which is almost laughable in the face of how boring the actual story is, but you gotta respect the guy for trying. Fortunately he had a day job to fall back on: he was a songwriter for what looks to be half of the big hits of the 60s, including Build Me Up Buttercup (performed by The Foundations) and Don’t Give Up On Us (performed by David Soul) as well as singles for Donna Summers, The 5th Dimension, Andy Williams, Scott Walker, and others. I can neither confirm nor deny that Build Me Up Buttercup is loosely based on the plot of THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR, but it would make about as much sense as anything else in this turkey.

I didn't think it was possible, but this French poster is even more misleading than the British one. And the "beast" is definitively NOT "Moitie Humain, molitie Animal... 100% Terrorisant!"  that is just a filthy French lie.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	A Chill-Filled Festival of Horror! -- a blatant lie if I ever heard one, unless you find old ladies drinking tea and talking evasively about their childhood to be in any way “Chill-filled” a “festival” or a “horror.”
TITLE ACCURACY	It’s not a beast, I guess there is a cellar, though.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Cannibal killer (basement-dwelling variety) / Maniac. I guess in the loosest possible sense also Slasher, since we do get some stalking and killing scenes peppered in there occasionally.
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Definitely
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Yes, we get a beast-in-the-cellar POV
MORAL OF THE STORY	“Don’t lock people up in the basement until they go insane because you fear that going to war will have a negative impact on their psyche.” Really though, the real moral is we definitely need more horror movies starring nice old ladies. But they need to be a lot better than this.