FrightFest review – Oddities
Written and directed by Tyler Savage – who made Blinders, one of that clutch of Uber/Lyft/Ryde-themed horors – this is at once quirkily strange in its sudden shifts of tone and genre and a traveller along roads which will be familiar to longterm genre fans.
Fleeing from a bad scene which leaves a drug dealer dead, party girls Rose (Lilimar) and Makenna (Lovie Simone) – who didn’t know that the dead guy was planning to rip off his partners and has their stash in the boot of his car – have an unnerving encounter with a suspicious cop called Officer M. Mills (Will Oldham). The suspicious cop in Psycho was played by an actor called Mort Mills. The Alfred Hitchcock/Robert Bloch film from 1960 is still a touchstone for horror – everytime someone does that From Dusk Till Dawn/Sinners switch from crime movie to horror movie, they owe Psycho a debt. Rather than a motel, the apparently folksy bad place on the road here is an antiques barn run by Betty (a magnificent Adrienne Barbeau) – she has a hulking son (Gunner Willis) who spies on girls through a Norman Bates peephole, though he comes across as more like the hefty Norman of the novel than Anthony Perkins’ skinny psycho.
In a shoutback to From Beyond the Grave (1974), another antiques store horror, Betty leaves her cash register open with a tempting bundle of notes in view … as a way of selecting folk who deserve what she’s been doing to folk who disappear round these parts. There are cages in the cellar, a compound for stolen cars, a creaky old neighbour (Xander Berkeley) who’s in on it, a lot of religious-sounding platitudes, torture porn feints about sex trafficking and a spiralling out of control as the dead guy’s angry partners show up only to run into seemingly straight senior citizens who are more dangerous than tatted-up gangbangers with guns. The last act passes through Psycho horror into something else, which would also be in the Robert Bloch wheelhouse – though it requires a manifestation which is a bit of a stretch for the budget.
Lilimar and Simone are bright presences, which they have to be since Rose and Makenna admit to being pretty appalling people – and are given to short-term decisions which turn out poorly for themselves and anyone else caught in the disaster area of their lives. Barbeau and Berkeley play similarly ghastly folks, though their vaguely religious conviction that they’re doing the right thing – which, who knows, they might be – actually makes them worse than the openly amoral, sensation-seeking women. The huge assembly of vintage oddities in the antiques shop – presumably courtesy of production designer Amber Unkle – is splendid.
Discussion
No comments yet.