C. Synchronic, also known as “bigger budget equals lots of zoom out to aerial shots… the movie.”

All joking aside (I will come back to it later), the movie is amazing. It utilizes that imperfection and character-study intimacy (in the mumblecore genre) that comes with indie films but they are able to pair it well with the spectacle of a larger budget aesthetic. That is a crucial component to keep this movie feeling fresh and ultimately make the audience care at a deeper level instead of just watching cool effects on a screen.


While I don’t want to spoil too much and I know Kyle will get more into it, the basic concept is there’s a synthetic drug going around that causes people to go back in time for about seven minutes, leading to unexplainable deaths or accidents that paramedics, Steve (Mackie) and Dennis (Dornan) are called to handle. Apparently they’re the only paramedics on staff in New Orleans too. After Steve finds out he only has about six weeks to live (the ol terminal illness plotline) and Dennis’ teenage daughter, Brianna (Ioannides) vanishes, Steve buys up all the Synchronic to search for her across time.


First, I think this is some of Dornan and Mackie’s best work. The indie film storytelling approach really allows the actors to get comfortable in their roles and relationships to one another in an authentic way that is missing from a lot of these melodramatic blockbusters or franchises. In connection with this on Benson and Moorhead’s part, the filmmakers (like in their previous work) excel at using familiar story tropes to create a familiar space for the audience but then make it unique by incorporating their personal touch. It’s clearly the last hurrah of their independence projects before they tackle a whole different beast, known as Disney.


I keep mentioning the obvious transition that is being made from indie to studio filmmaker, which I’ve made clear are some of its strengths. However, I mention this because in modern indie films (like their work prior) there tends to be a lot of meandering. They’re trying to fill a feature’s length of time on a low budget, they’re more character-driven to avoid budgetary costs, there’s a slew of reasons but that’s why mumblecore seems to get a bad rap for a lot of audiences. This never gets dull or goes too far on the spectrum to become a work of self-indulgence but there are moments where I was taken out of the movie (look to my opening joke). Early on we get the whole “time isn’t a straight line” explanation that is said in some form or another in most time travel or black hole movies, which leads to several scenes being replayed throughout with a slight change in dialogue or shift in perspective. That part is amazing and works perfectly with the plot. For me, I found myself taken out of the movie when every other shot was a zoom out to an aerial shot, a drone shot, or a new favorite of rotating the camera so the street now looks like it's the sky. They look beautiful and they’re utilizing that bigger budget but if only ten minutes in I’m thinking, “they’re doing that a lot,” it loses the “wow” factor and enters that unfortunate realm of indie, auteur self-indulgence.


There’s no denying Synchronic is an amazing movie. Benson and Moorhead have yet again made another mind-bending flick that is also accessible to a general audience, in the same way that Nolan’s Inception seemed complicated until you gave it some thought. The only issues that I had again are scripting or establishing shot elements that (for a movie like this) start to be seen as filler rather than stylistic choices. Really, I’m interested to see what they accomplish with the Moon Knight episodes they direct and working with a tighter script.


J.  IMDB says Synchronic was released in 2019.  Google says October 23, 2020.  I saw it in 2021… hell, it could conceivably be the film of all three years.  Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have become quite the science fiction/horror auteur-types in the last five years or so and rightfully so.  Like The Endless before Synchronic is a very high concept idea that’s executed in a very minimalist way.  That’ll make sense once you see the movie.  The story is always interesting and keeps you guessing.  The actors are terrific.  The cinematography and direction is terrific.  And honestly, if you’re a genre fan, you should have a pretty good idea what you’re in for with a film by Benson and Moorhead: a thought provoking, wholly original, emotional thrilling journey.


K.  Synchronic follows Steve (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan) two paramedics in New Orleans, amidst a rampant opioid crisis.  The thing is users have begun overdosing in gruesomely inexplicable ways, often possessing items from primitive time periods.  Dennis’s daughter, Brianna (Ally Ioannides) goes missing during a party while Steve discovers that the titular synthetic drug, Synchronic, has an effect on the pineal gland of young adults causing them to travel through time for 7 minutes per dose, and this may be the key to bringing Brianna back.


These cosmic themes harken back to their earlier work, specifically Resolution and The Endless.  Here they’ve created an interesting new spin on the sci-fi time travel plot, within a much more grounded and character-based story.  Using the drug as the time travel vehicle and the user’s geographic location as a temporal and spatial junction point, serving to underline the theme of time.  That which is fleeting and rarely, if ever, fully appreciated by those blessed with it.  We see how the present is only one layer of a vast temporal cake.


The film is beautifully shot and constructed.  The time travel sequences are exquisitely crafted, tense with the thrill and danger of jumping around in time.  Mackie and Dornan are in top form.  Mackie has a few of the film’s funniest moments, drunkenly riffing on Back to the Future in particular.  Though I must admit I was more intellectually interested than emotionally invested in the story, until the film’s final scene when it all hit home.  I think this is Benson and Moorhead’s best work to date, and I’ve enjoyed all of their work.  It feels like the culmination of all their previous films.

How much fabric can you get from a movie about a killer pair of jeans?

Like Rubber, In Fabric, Killer Sofa, and many others that have popped up over the last decade, Slaxx is the new installment into the killer inanimate objects’ subgenre (is that what it is being called?) that tries to stretch a feature’s worth of story out of an idea more suited for a 30-minute episode of Tales from the Crypt. Now with Rubber and In Fabric, they go into an esoteric, arthouse route to provide some reasoning for a killer tire or dress. Does it help them? For some. But, at least by embracing the absurdity with more meta and visual storytelling they create rules to forgive certain story issues.

Initially the story starts off with a young woman picking cotton on a farm in India specifically for Canadian Cotton Clothiers, a H&M or Forever 21-like company that prides itself on its organic farming and philanthropy, a scene replayed several times. After it is revealed this one of the experimental farms (whatever that may mean), we quickly jump to one of their stores in Canada that is preparing for Monday Madness (like Black Friday). The new hire, Libby (Denis) is ecstatic about joining the family due to the message they preach, but quickly finds out what life in the retail world is like. Her naivety is further diminished when a pair of the Super Shapers, pants that are meant to provide a perfect fit, begins killing the employees during their overnight lockdown. Also, the Super Shapers logo looks uncannily like the Nazi “SS” but that is not explored further.

For the first 30 minutes, the movie is a lot of fun as a satire on the retail world, with some silly kills to make gore hounds happy. There is a ton of dry, black comedy that comes from the store manager, Craig (Donahue), who, despite the death count, is trying to keep things on track so he can earn the regional manager promotion. During that beginning it feels like it could make its feature length by sticking to this black comedy approach of trying to coverup the murders for selfish reasons, since there have been many movies with that approach that work well.

However, early on the pants earns its four souls needed to… never really explained, which comes off as lazy worldbuilding, rather than earned ambiguity. And that is when the tonal shift comes to fill a run time. With the four souls required and most of the large cast are  then killed offscreen, Libby, Craig, and Shruti (Bhojani) learn the dark secret behind the Super Shapers origin and why they love Bollywood music. Sounds silly and slightly culturally insensitive, right? They actually take a serious turn in examining child labor and how these companies make their products, which is a noble topic to discuss, relevant, and crucial to buying anything. Unfortunately, the pseudo-serious shift does not take away from the cultural insensitivity, instead it magnifies the problems within the story more and the surface-level message it is trying to convey.

The movie was already accomplishing its commentary, while providing a ridiculous story about killer pants, but it feels like the writers decided to really drive the point home and make everything on-the-nose. It becomes boring, halting all momentum and unbearably longer than it should be. Also, on a technical note, a big chunk during this period gets really dark to where it was no better than watching with the video off.
​
The longer I sit on Slaxx, the more issues I think of that could be examined, but for the audience’s sake it ultimately comes down to: if you’re going to do something like this, then make it tight, which should be common knowledge for any story, or at least make it ridiculous enough that the laws of the world you’re building are unreliable by their nature. Something that I was looking forward to and enjoyed for a bit, secured its spot as another idea that should have been left at the wouldn’t-it-be-funny-if stage.


1 1/2 out of 5

In order to give what we believe to be a more unbiased constructive criticism of the piece, the members of Bloodhound Pix are tackling each review as a panel of three. None of the members know the others’ thoughts on the content until after they submit their initial response.

C. Alien, Pandorum, The Thing and whatever other movies revolved around crew members facing a foreign lifeforce in a confined and isolated location. I wanted to get it out of the way, because there are moments where they clearly pay homage to other iconic films in that realm, making its connection even more apparent. Lately filmmakers wear their influences on their sleeves which inevitably creates an uphill battle for their films to stand on their own, leaving us as an audience thinking we’d just rather watch the one we already know is good.


Enter Anti-Life (or Breach in the States).


The movie itself is fun and fortunately that’s what it is shooting for, making the obvious homages and some of the flaws more forgiving. It’s technically competent and they make the use of the effects they can based on, what appears to be, a smaller budget. As I believe others will mention and if you’ve seen any recent films of his, it’s great seeing Bruce Willis do more than just coast through a role. He is entertaining, charming and you almost want the movie to be about this older crew on their last trip to new Earth (or 2nd Earth), trying to keep everything functioning while 1000s of people are in cryosleep. However, Cody Kearsley does a decent enough job to be the newbie that gives us the opportunity for other characters to provide exposition dumps and forced stakes (because he’s not supposed to be on the ship and the mother of his child is in cryosleep).


The movie does have points where it tries to add more plot elements than are necessary for unknown reasons, like there are rebels that believe humanity should die on our planet we screwed up instead of finding a new home. It ultimately feels like another add-on to up the stakes and create tension but all it does is add purposeless plot.


At the end of the day it’s a B-action movie that is meant to be enjoyed with friends and junk food or drinks. When Anti-Life/Breach embraces those elements, it’s enjoyable. The moment it takes itself seriously, it becomes convoluted and graces us with long scenes of explanation.


J.  This movie isn’t good… but I fuckin’ loved it!  It’s got my boy, Thomas Jane (although he’s more of a cameo) so that right there moves this one up a notch or two.  It’s a complete rip off of Alien and The Thing and also manages to toss in some zombie shit on top of everything.  Sounds good right?!  Well, the execution is suspect most of the time.  So much so that it reminded me of something Asylum or Uncork’d would do although a little higher quality.  I also can’t remember seeing Bruce Willis awake for a “performance” recently and he seems pretty lucid for most of this one.  His character makes his own moonshine and is consistently drunk throughout the narrative.  Made me wonder if old Bruce himself was imbibing between scenes… to stay in character of course.  Anyway, Alien and The Thing, yes this film has both and doesn’t shy away from either influence, complete with a character uttering the line, “you gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.”  This film has like a 3.7/10 on IMDB and a 23% Rotten Tomatoes but I say to hell with that.  This is stupid and downright abysmal but it’s a lot of fun.  And Thomas Jane.


K.  Anti-Life is a strange amalgam of sci-fi plots and tropes.  A space freighter is headed to New Earth, aka Earth 2, since we’ve apparently ruined the original Earth with pollution and whatnot (not far from reality) and a ragtag group of misfits are tasked with overseeing the ship’s journey as the upper class passengers lie in luxurious hypersleep.  Among the crew is our protagonist who has impregnated the daughter of the Colonel (Thomas Jane) and has yet to break the news and face the inherent class disparity.  He’s partnered with Clay (Bruce Willis) to maintain the ship, space-mopping and all that fun space-maintenance.  From there it cycles through a million tropes, they release a ethereal cosmic evil that infects the crew members one by one, turning them into zombies and later Thing-like monsters.  So, you have Alien and The Thing ripped off right there.  Which would be fine, if they had added something of their own.


But they don’t.  The crew is largely made up of disposable characters.  The protagonist isn’t very interesting.  Bruce Willis steals all the scenes as a gruff and weary space grunt and seems to be having a hell of a good time.  He should have been our protagonist.  The movie would have been way more fun and enjoyable.  Aside from him, Thomas Jane and Rachel Nichols turn in good performances.  Though again, Thomas Jane is vastly underused.  The cinematography, desaturated color palette and attempts at futuristic production design coalesce into a low budget blandness that doesn’t seem worth the effort.


There’s some fun moments, but they’re overshadowed by dumb characters, filler and a lot of gruff hazing of the protagonist that’s supposed to qualify as conflict but, in fact, isn’t.

K.  Wrong Turn begins with Scott (Matthew Modine) arriving in a small Virginia town searching for his missing daughter Jen (Charlotte Vega) who was hiking the Appalachian Trail with a group of friends.  Then we jump back six weeks to meet Jen and her boyfriend Darius (Adain Bradley), and the two couples joining them, Milla (Emma Dumont) and Adam (Dylan McTee), and Luis (Adrian Favela) and Gary (Vardaan Arora).  They stop in the same small Virginia town to spend the night before hitting the trail.  They have a classic bar room run-in with a local redneck (Tim DeZarn) that plays out in a fresh way.  The next morning they hit the trail.


In town they’re warned not to stray from the trail, but of course they do, and end up on the wrong side of a giant log rolling down hill.  Gary is crushed to death.  The rest are wounded and now lost in the woods.  There’s the usual tropes of in-fighting, jumping to conclusions and the loss of their cellphones.  This all culminates with Milla going missing and Adam being caught in a strange trap and pulled underground.  Jen, Darius and Luis later spot two giant men in strange costumes with skull masks carrying Adam through the woods, his body tied to a log with a sack over his head.  Darius charges toward them.  Adam gets free and beats one of the men to death with a log.  The other one gets away...and then Milla shows up, alive.  There’s some back and forth as to whether or not Adam should have killed the man, though the weirdo guy’s intentions seemed to be sinister.


Then the group is captured by The Foundation, a cult-like community that retreated into the mountains before the outbreak of the Civil War to create their own society.  Led by John Venable (Bill Sage), the Foundation has cultivated a way of life without society’s ills (war, race, violence), but these interlopers have murdered one of their people, and thus must be sentenced to darkness aka getting your eyeballs ripped out and thrown into a catacomb-like cell.  Jen bargains her way out of this by offering herself to John as his wife.  They allow Jen and Darius to join the Foundation and renounce the outside world.  Then Scott shows up to free Jen...and I’ll stop my synopsis there because I’ve already spoiled enough.

Now the original Wrong Turn isn’t particularly a classic.  It’s one of the many Texas Chainsaw rip-offs that we’ve seen pop up over the years.  And this film starts with its feet firmly planted in the “Hipsters versus Hicks” genre but then subverts that in new and interesting ways which unfortunately negate its very genre.  For example, the Foundation cult is humanized and we come to understand their justification in punishing Jen and her friends, albeit in cruel and unusual ways but this understanding equals not scary aka not horror.  Delving too deeply into their motivations and making those motivations rational, actually turns our protagonists/victims into the aggressors here, fraying our sympathy for them and giving us a multi-faceted view of the conflict (which normally I would, and in some ways still do, commend) but here it serves to weaken the conflict and the sense of dread, sucking the horror right out of it.  Furthermore, humanizing these cult members demonstrates that they can be reasoned with, had Adam not impulsively killed one of their members.  As Jen proves when she negotiates for Darius and her to join them in order to survive.  If you can reason with them, then they’re not scary.  *(One exception being a scene where Jen and Scott have to escape through the dark catacombs filled with sightless, starved prisoners of the Foundation, which still plays more to the action).


That being said, the film has a lot going for it.  The acting is solid throughout, despite a few melodramatic moments due to the writing.  The cinematography, production design and costumes are fantastic, really intricate and creepy, though ultimately undermined by being shown too much.  The script takes unexpected turns and plays off the hipster and hick cliches and then humanizes both parties.  Despite everything I’ve outlined above about why this isn’t really a horror film, the choices that facilitated that are bold and fresh and would be more of an asset in another genre.  Ultimately, this plays more as an action thriller and as such plays very well.  But given the Wrong Turn title which firmly plants it in the horror genre, horror fans and Wrong Turn fans will likely find it lacking in scares and those who would enjoy this probably won’t seek it out because of the title.  So, it’s a catch 22.  I would recommend it over all, just know going in that it is not going to deliver on the horror.


C. While I’ve had a fascination with The Wrong Turn series for some time, it is sadly a blindspot for me as a horror fan. I know by number 2 it enters the realm of self awareness and embraces the violence and absurdity of the tired backwoods, cannibal, hillbillies/mutants. Wrong Turn (2021) or Wrong Turn: Foundation is not that. Rather it is a reboot/sequel that was labelled as bringing it back to its serious roots (was it ever that serious?) and taking the setting into a new direction by focusing on a different group. The latter I know is true. Take Wrong Turn, Wicker Man and a serious version of Tucker and Dale and that will give a clear layout of what they were going for. It goes from backwoods horror, to cult horror, and even sprinkles in revenge action thriller elements.


First, I have to commend the movie on taking a chance with the new approach and also having the setup where the “crazed hillbillies'' are just kind of trying to live their lives while the outsiders come in, misjudge the situation and mess it all up. I mention this mainly because it’s something I’ve been dying to see for a long time, again, the backwoods horror subgenre has entered, for many, a paint-by-numbers format that has become difficult to set themselves apart from either The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes. This was able to set itself apart in some aspects.


Yes, we ultimately follow the same tropes, which you wish they would completely take a new spin. The group are sexy, college-age people. We get the final girl and the impregnation that “needs'' to happen in all these plots. Torture. However, part of where the movie shines is in its attempt to provide weight to the story and the brutality opposed to the gratuitous sex and violence that has been the standout trait this series has become known for. The acting is solid, it’s shot well and attempts to be more atmospheric than one would expect from these kinds of movies.


I feel the biggest issue is in its attempts to set itself apart from the others in the series.  Wrong Turn (2021) gets lost in the details. It’s not as fun as the previous installments are meant to be (from what I’ve been told) and by providing clear motivation and moments of potential empathy for the villains, it loses the horror of “why is this happening to us?”. Quite the conundrum but I know for fans of the series it will become a divisive entry from those that love it for its fresh take and those that feel the movie should have been called a different name and was only using the title for a marketing ploy because original properties don’t sell. Can you guess this argument has popped up for most of the major horror franchises?


For someone that hasn’t seen the others (me), I think it was very well done. I just wish there was a little more time spent honing the story and finding consistency to really drive home all the ideas used to attempt an anti-backwoods horror film.


J.  Let me start by saying this film should not have Wrong Turn in the title.  We’ve come to expect certain things like, cannibal, inbred, mutant monsters associated with the Wrong Turn franchise.  This film has none of that.  Second, the dude that plays the lead villain, in this “Foundation” looks just like Orson Welles, which is amazing.  Third, the script is structured in a rather unique way whereby we go about 45 minutes as a faux Wrong Turn film and then it completely shifts gears into something else entirely.  I give the writer Alan McElroy credit for that but it just didn’t work for me.  Fourth, we learned nothing from Prometheus about running the correct way from something rolling toward you that will make you dead.  The first 45 minutes were tense and creepy but then after that it sort of becomes a stretch to suspend disbelief.  Like a serious stretch.  And this is a Wrong Turn film.  It’s brutal as all hell which is a plus and the score was amazing, which is also a plus as I dig awesome music.  But man, after that 45 minute mark… eh… I can’t spoil it so just take my word.  Just don’t go into this thinking you’re getting a Wrong Turn film because you’re not.  The runtime was a problem too.  It didn’t need to hover at 2 hours by any means and there were about 4 false conclusions which was unnecessary.  The characters were all pretty annoying, especially the one who constantly is taking pictures of herself with her phone, which makes me wanna puke but they do get put in their place by the titular “Foundation” and you’ll see what I mean.  I was actually pleasantly surprised for the most part and suggest you all check this out when you can.

Bloodhound Pix is made up of: Craig Draheim, Josh Lee, and Kyle Hintz

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One of the downsides to living in Edinburgh, the home of the world's largest arts festival, is that you get invited to a lot of shows, a lot of shows that you didn't want to watch, and after sitting through them, you wish you lived on some remote island.  Many of these shows are "experimental" one-man shows where you are forced to sit through some drama student's idea of what is entertainment.  

Those memories run deep, which is why when the filmmakers behind Faye initially contacted Ginger Nuts of Horror for a review of their one-woman horror film, I was initially filled with extreme trepidation.  The memories of sitting in some dingy basement watching someone for an hour or so, bring me as close to the point of murder as I have ever come, came flooding back.  However, I gave the shot and watched the trailer that they sent over with the initial contact.  And I have to say I was intrigued; from the get-go, the trailer didn't give much away, but what I saw made me think that this had the potential to be something special.  

Faye bills itself as the first single female-led feature film; how could that work? I hear you ask, how can a horror film work where Faye is the only character to ever appear on the screen? Where does the tension, the fear and the sense of horror come from?  I to was wary about this; I had visions of it being a film filled with shots of mirrors acting as mirrors are wont to do in horror films.  Thankfully that's not the case; the horror comes mainly from the intense performance from Sarah Zanotti and the many creative ways in which the filmmakers approach the concept of having only one actor on the screen for the entire length of the film.  

The film itself is a simple tale, where Faye, a successful self-help guru, is struggling to write the follow-up to her latest bestselling book and is sent to find some quality alone time in her agent's cabin in the woods.  I know, that should already have alarm bells ringing in Faye's head and ours; nothing good has ever come from spending any time in an isolated cabin in the woods, especially when you consider that Faye is already struggling from the recent death of her husband in a car accident.  That is just a recipe for disaster.  And sure enough, Faye becomes haunted by a presence in the cabin, a presence that is desperate to gain retribution.  

I've watched many a film over the years, which has these familiar tropes as the film's driving force; this meant that Faye needed to pull something special out of the hat to grab my attention.    And boy, did it do just that, unless you read the marketing blurbs for the film or this review, you would never believe that a crew of only four people shot the film, nevermind that it was shot on an iPhone.  The cinematography is exceptional; from incredible drone scene-setting shots to intelligent tracking and steady-cam shots, the cameras work is worthy of a film with a much higher budget.  Combined with some assured editing, innovative cuts, and excellent set lighting, the film looks impressive.  It rips apart the notion that you need tons of expensive equipment to shoot a movie that looks good.  The only downside to watching Faye is that it will make me far more critical of over "low budget" films; if Faye can make a film look good, why can't others.  

The soundtrack wonderfully complements the film; it never overbears on any scene or over signals ay of the few jump scares in the movie.  This is an emotional film with a lot of heart, and the soundtrack works perfectly in unison with the events on the screen to drive home the film's emotional beats.  From what I am lead to believe, the soundtrack was an early mix, with sone final tweaks still to be made to it, but to be honest, I would not have known this if they hadn't told me.  

My only criticism of the film's production side is, at times, the sound quality of Sarah Zanotti's voice in the movie has that recorded on a small stage feel, where it had a sort of echoey feel to it.  Truthfully, it's a minor gripe that will hopefully be addressed in the film's final edit.  

The film is split into five chapters. With each chapter being told from the perspective of the Five Stages of Grief, I wasn't aware of this going into the film. It took me a couple of chapters to understand the concept behind the movie narrative structure.  Each chapter is headed by a monologue from Sarah Zanotti, sitting on a chair on a stage.  I loved how they kept these segments ambiguous, with you unsure as to when these scenes are set in the story's narrative, are the recorded before the events of the film or are they set after the events of the film.  It's a clever ploy as it keeps you guessing as to whether or not Faye makes it out of the movie alive.  Don't worry; I won't spoil the film for you; I'm not even going to say much more about what happens in the rest of the film, as this is one of those films that are best watched with as little prior knowledge as possible.  

The film does contain several familiar tropes, and yes, there are a couple of jump scares, but the filmmaker's knowledge of genre prevents them from either being overused or even cliched.  You can tell that this isn't just a bunch of friends who got together and thought, "Hey, let's make a film", they have a deep understanding of both the genre and how to make a great horror film.  

This brings us to the central part of this film, Sarah Zanotti performance as Faye.  I'll say this you have got to have a lot of courage to accept a role like this, ninety minutes of screen time where you are the only thing on screen for the viewer to focus on.  When they said the spotlight would be on you, I don't think any actor would have imagined this level of scrutiny.  There was no place, literary or metaphorically, for Sarah Zanotti to hide.  The whole film lives or dies on her performance.  

What a complete and utter revelation; I've lost count of the number of films where the actors could barely act their way out of a paper bag, let alone have a performance that is so captivating you can hang a whole movie on their shoulders.  

Sarah Zanotti's nuanced, emotional and powerful portrayal of Faye is a pure honour to watch.  Her performance range and depth are magnificent; from delivering some light comedic relief to scenes of severe emotional trauma, she is never anything but convincing.  Watching her performance develop and change as we go through the five stages of grief is a revelation, with both the subtle side and the more overtly broad brush strokes elements of her performance being allowed to breathe on screen, ensuring that viewer's eyes and concentration never wander from what is unfolding in front of them.   

As a horror film, Faye delivers the goods with gusto, panache, and style; however, what lifts this film from being just another haunted cabin move is its sympathetic handling of the concept of grief, regret and self-hate.  

Faye is a film that shatters the conception that horror films have nothing real to say; it takes the limitations of what many class as horror and rewrites the rulebook.  

A powerful, emotionally driven film, Faye is an arresting film, with a beguiling performance from its lead that deserves to be on everyone's must watch list. ​

C. I agree with Kyle but I would have loved to see the other characters utilized more and even taking a detour from the repetition at the midpoint to allow for more satisfying storytelling. However, it is what it is and I’m definitely glad it exists. Watch it with friends, junk food, and drinks when the pandemic is over… or I guess you could do a virtual watch party.


K.  I think we’re in agreement that it is a fun film to turn your brain off and enjoy.  There are issues with the repetition, that I’m sure would’ve been solved had they been working with a slightly larger budget and been able to expand the scope a bit.  But it’s still a blast, earning all my respect for committing to its simple premise and not letting Nicolas Cage utter a word.


Bloodhound’s average score: 4 out of 5