Director: Debbie Rochon
Year: 2015
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Moving into a new home, a married couple think their neighbors’ odd behaviors are just weird quirks for an older woman, but once a series of strange disappearances strike the local girls his wife believes her instincts to suspect the neighbor was killing everyone all along and tries to stop her from continuing.
Review:
This one was a pretty enjoyable effort overall. One of the strongest elements to this one is the endearingly goofy charm centered around the main killer at the center of the events. That the entirety of everyone who goes to visit her ends up unable to believe she’s capable of being the psychotic, sadistic killer that enjoys eating her victims means so much to how she can get away with everything. The inner monologues she has about the different people in her life, from letting the cheerleader yammer on about their fundraiser, the hitchhiker talking about her upbringing or the extremely sexual nature of her targets creates a deep, dark trip into her psychological state to deal with the victims. The constant infomercials on TV showing the plus-size presenter discussing all manner of deviant, sxual perversions in a trashy, enjoyable manner add to this one quite nicely.
That factor goes hand-in-hand with the over-the-top scenes of her carving up and tormenting her victims. From the wholesale carving up of the cheerleaders’ best friend to the dismembering of the hitchhiker due to the comments made in the car-ride earlier and the special show she performs for a tied-up victim before completely cutting them to pieces play nicely off the mindset we’ve been given about her earlier. The sexually-charged scenes, centered around targeting her victims for perceived or implied sexual transgressions in her snapped mind, is a fine motivator for what the fun and deranged torture scenes all about where the nice gore and brutal kills come together in a fine exploitation-style mash-up. Combined with the frantic finale that has some solid action involved, these aspects are what manage to hold the film up overall.
There are some flaws present. The most glaring issue here is the nearly nonexistent storyline where things just tend to happen simply to move the story along. The initial stages where she comes to believe the suspicions of the neighbor come off with no real motivation or impetus to believe she’s doing anything wrong after just moving in the night before, and how the missing person’s cases come about to bring the officers into the picture don’t really serve any logical sense here. As well, the finale comes off incredibly confusing where the jerking camera makes it difficult to determine anything, the ambiguity is quite prominent is not being entirely positive about the true nature of everyone’s outcomes and a few characters tend to pop back-and-forth between being obvious about what’s going on and not obvious about what’s going on and not which all come together into not making any sense. These are what knock this one down the most.
Overview: ***/5
Far more enjoyable than expected, this one generates some great aspects to be able to counteract the few negative qualities that come about here which do tend to lower this one slightly. Give it a shot if you’re into this style of slasher effort or are fans of the creative crew involved due to the reputations behind the camera, while those that are turned off by the flaws here might heed caution.
This review ran as part of our month-long Women in Horror Month celebration. Click the banner below to check out all the interviews and reviews we've conducted for the event:
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