FrightFest review – Sick Puppy
Charlie (Natasha Calis), a veterinary nurse, is especially good at calming down animals who are about to be given a lethal injection – an unusual skill which perhaps ought to give her co-workers more pause than it does. A former cheerleader, Charlie is married to the former class creep – buff, moustached John (Brett Geddes), who does yard work under the supervision of his father and has a bit of a reputation for perving on female clients (especially daughters of the house). John also abducts young girls and ‘trains’ them to be dogs, sexually abusing them until he gets tired or they disappoint – whereupon their bodies get dumped in the woods. Charlie knows about John’s side interest but loyally helps him get away with serial murder, though she’s also jealous of the dog girls and wishes he’d channel his urges into something like pottery.
Cop Dale Karloff (Dylan Taylor), who has bad history with Charlie from school, is on the missing girls case. It may be the dim realisation that Charlie won’t help him get away with this forever which prompts John to swear off murder. However, his path to staying clean is complicated by a teasing, interestingly obnoxious, surprisingly cunning teen temptress, Mia (Rachel Boyd). And Charlie finds herself taking more and more extreme actions to cover for her husband, prompting her to wonder whether there’s really much difference between expedient and sadistic crime.
Writer-director Jay Reid’s serial killer sit-com has some very black humour and nuanced, committed performances. It’s one of several films in this FrightFest to use the trope of treating people like animals as a signifier of sick puppy syndrome – and it isn’t entirely free of that kink whereby a film is so much more interested in the psychology and difficult situation of its perpetrators than the agonies of victims viewed as disposable that it verges on endorsing the killer POV as legit. However, the film does turn the screws on John, belittling him as a man (and as a potter) and turning the situation around as Mia, who refuses to have her behaviour circumscribed by creeps, spots all the signs of serial killer about him and initiates a campaign of merciless, aggressive teasing which brings about multiple crises in the killers’ household. Calis, Geddes and Boyd are the sort of performers who’ve showed up in glossy TV series – they obviously relish the chance to play pretty people with a lot more dark twisted stuff going on under the surface.
Here’s the FrightFest listing.
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