What the hell did I just watch? It claims to be a movie called The Loved Ones, an Australian horror film written and directed by Sean Byrne. What I think it actually is, is a prank in some absurd contest between horror directors for who can come up with the most deranged, over-the-top, stupid-bloody, bizarre and senseless crap possible.
I'm sure a lot of this is going to mirror my complaints about Asylum Blackout, but that movie actually had a character or two, a setup, and an ok ending. The Loved Ones exists solely to bombard the viewer with as much twisted violence as possible, delivered by some cute but mentally disturbed girl. Which I'm sure is part of its angle, a sort of "Oooo lookie she wears pink and lobotomizes boys with a power drill while giggling about it" thing.
Well, that jokes gets old pretty quickly and the movie has nothing else that makes any sense to offer. The beginning of the movie is a perfect example: It starts in teen movie mode, with pretty-boy Brent doing school, buying drugs, talking about condoms with his friend. There's a dance coming up and Brent is going with his girlfriend, Holly. This requires him to turn down a sweet, comely girl, named Lola. Brent goes to screw his girlfriend in the car, and after he gets to EXPERIENCE BIJ he goes home and acts depressed. Suddenly, he's decided to go into the wilderness and climb a rock face. After staring at the sun he for a while he's assaulted by an old guy and dragged off to a pickup truck. If that seems jarring and inconsistent, it's because it is. I have no idea why our protagonist went from getting laid, to listening to heavy metal, to mumbling at his mom, to free climbing, except to provide a conveniently isolated location for him to be abducted from.
The rest of the movie plays like a mating of the Mickey Mouse Club and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. With lobotomized cannibal pseudo-zombies. Can't forget those. They're in there, in some secret basement pit with blast-doors under the living room floor. And I think the worst part is that everything that I've mentioned, aside from the heavy metal and the rock climbing, are in the preview. There's nothing this movie has, plot wise, that hasn't already been shown. So the only reason to watch is to see everything that was hinted at get revealed in uncensored glory. It's like they made a trailer and then filled in the blanks.
The Loved Ones also does that high-contrast, slightly desaturated thing that seems pretty popular now in movies like yellowbrickroad, though the scenes in the torture house are sharply lit and over-saturated to make everything look even more screwed up and garish. I was half expecting low-angle shots with a fish-eye lens like a 90s grunge music video.
The one shot I actually enjoyed was right at the end where Lola's in the prom dress, bloody and beaten, crawling down the street with a cleaver in-hand.
Outside of that, this was like...Disney presents iCarly in HOSTEL. I am so sick of torture porn. I'm gonna go watch Absentia again.
--PXA
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