FrightFest review – The Only Ones
This opens with a grainy precis of a slasher film legend – about Boneface, a hulking thug who hides out in the woods and kills folks – narrated by Bruce Wagner, who is being channelled by Zach (Zach Ruchkin), a callow podcaster guy in a van full of young people heading out to the sticks … and stresses that Zach seems to be really keen on the weekend fulfilling all his horror film-and-true crime-fuelled fantasies. At the last chance gas station, Zach is eager for ominous pronouncements from the locals – but the only thing the city folks are warned against is the possibility of rain.
A mix of old friends and new partners are helping Nicky (Paul Cottman) check out an isolated house he’s inherited from an uncle … which turns out to have uninvited visitors, though the older camping couple who have semi-broken in for shelter are less alarming to the gang than the fact that loose cannon Jude (Jeb Aufiero) has brought a gun along and is delighted to have an opportunity to wave it in the face of someone else with a short fuse and a hidden knife. It seems likely that a feud is going to escalate, and Jude and Zach adding shrooms to the mix doesn’t help – Zach’s girlfriend Casey (Cayla Berejikian) is constantly filming as if this were a found footage feature (it’s not) and there’s an additional tension in that Sarah (Tatiana Nya Ford), the girl Zach has always had a crush on, is here with her girlfriend Valerie (Emily Classen), who has her own simmering issues and resentments. Every time a bow and arrow set or an axe or a pocket knife is presented onscreen, it’s an omen. And is Boneface (Hoss Russell) still out there?
The Only Ones starts out as deliberately archetypal, which means it’s slightly too easy to peg as a knowing slasher variant – somewhere between In a Violent Nature and Tucker and Dale versus Evil – before it goes in a different direction as a shaggy dog collection of bad situations which get gruesomely out of control. There’s an underlying sense that none of these people have been well-advised to hang around with this group in this situation, and a few snatches of dialogue (and a few too many expository speeches) establish their tangle of backstories. That the camping couple have been prescribed a trip into the woods by a therapist – James (Christopher Inlow) has low self-esteem and a tripwire temper, and was told that this experience would get him a sense of control … only having a gun shoved in his face by an obviously hopped-up lunatic gives him the opposite effect (the fact that he’s in the wrong just makes it worse). The corpse-strewn storyline is darkly comic, but writer-director Jordan Miller has some serious material to chew over about the just-barely-concealed deep fissures between Americans at the moment – without talking politics, the mix of races, ages, social classes and sexualities in the cast inevitably highlight the way a country which seemed just about able to get along has decided to throw it all away and launch attacks on each other on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Here’s the FrightFest listing.
Discussion
No comments yet.