Hey there horror-fans, so I’m coming through on my promise to update this piece of shit a little bit more, and also we just brewed up a crazy good batch of homemade mead so we’ve been drinking like it’s the Middle Ages… And for those interested you can take a look at our mead-making co-op on ye olde crackbook – http://www.facebook.com/faeriebrewing. Also in other fun but less alcoholic news, my hetero-life partner has also started doing reviews for this page, and his most recent post was regarding the mess, The Haunting of Whaley House by Asylum and I must say it was a poorly written however succint piece and I think our future plan is to post a more smaller blurb pieces for the shittiest movies.

And since it’s in bad form to be a negative Nancy all the fucking time, I’ve made it my mission to also review movies I enjoyed watching, or at least didn’t make me want to hang myself while the Idiot plays on repeat..

So I have for you: The Loved Ones

Let me start this review by saying, torture porn has been done to death (pun not intended but hilarious none the less), and I won’t deny that. The horror genre has this bad habit of taking something new and exciting and then running with it for way too long, you know rather than heaven fucking forbid try new things and see what happens. I will say that the first time I saw Eli Roth’s Hostel in theatres, it rocked me! I loved it! I had to challenge myself to not look away – especially at the part where the one guy has his Achilles tendon cut and tries desperately to crawl out of the torture room.

However. now when I watch movies of a torture porn nature I just get bored. You could strap a dude to a chair, tar and feather him, light him on fire and peel off his skin and I’d barely be paying attention. Like all horror addicts I’m always looking for that scare, that little bit of fear to go tingling up my spine or just really fucked up shit to stick in my head for weeks afterward and randomly come back to me while I’m doing yoga or driving to work. I find so often now that I just end up bored watching movies, and since boredom is pretty much the opposite of fear, I’m a tough sell for a lot of the new horror movies coming out. I’m like the Dana Scully of the horror set, just automatically skeptical and ready for anything with a sigh of contempt. New movies as of late have just been one disappointment after another, but I will say however that, new school horror or not, A Serbian Film ruined my life and I never ever need to see it ever again and that anyone who potentially enjoyed it should really rethink their life choices. And for anyone debating watching it let me just say there’s baby-rape and that’s not even the worst part of the film. Disgusting. For the record I watched that film once and I will never watch it again, it doesn’t even bear being reviewed, and I will never say anything more about it. LETS NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN.

So I first saw a bit about this film in an issue of Rue Morgue and was intrigued (mostly because I really like the color pink and I’m automatically drawn to it like a crow to a gum wrapper or goat to tin can), and looking back now this was either an awesome marketing ploy to get bitches to watch it, or just looked super creepy in contrast, like how you see sexy little goth girls with their tattoos and big fuck-me boots wearing Hello Kitty backpacks, that whole sour sweet thing, you know?

My strange attraction to girly colors aside, I did some research into The Loved Ones and found it is listed as one of the best Australian horror films, right alongside Wolf Creek and this did not strike me as a good thing, because once I went to the theatre to see Wolf Creek with a girlfriend of mine and we were the only ones there until some creepy older dude came in and sat RIGHT BESIDE us and as soon as the credits started to come up and it said “made in Australia”, buddy got up and walked out and didn’t come back, and I’ve wondered ever since if he just hated Australia super hard, or what the story was there. He had with him a bag of McDonald’s chicken McNuggets, so maybe they gave him BBQ sauce when he really wanted Honey Mustard and he had to go sort that shit out – some people are very particular about their movie snacking – for instance, I have to have at least a half bottle of mead before I even consider watching any Asylum flicks. My lady friend (who also writes a hilarious blog which you can find over at http://rigsamarole.wordpress.com) and I stayed to watch Wolf Creek much to our own chagrin and come the end of the film we were wishing we’d left with the creepy guy to eat chicken McNuggets in the back of his camper van. Wolf Creek was terrible and I don’t even know why. Maybe I couldn’t get the picture of Steve Irwin out of my head the whole time, or what I don’t even know. I was barely able to sit through Wolf Creek and it felt like sitting through the fucking Lord of the Rings: Two Towers.. it just didn’t fucking end.. Honestly though Wolf Creek was only 99 minutes, but it felt like a fucking eternity, a boring Australian accented eternity..

Also just going to say, this isn’t me hating on Australians.. I think Australia is awesome, and my handy man is this crazy dude from Australia who once crushed a whole nest of baby mice we found in my basement, with his huge hiking boot just because he felt like it and is also apparently bad ass unlike the movie Wolf Creek.

Anyways further to that, torture porn is so fucking over but it hasn’t stopped this endless flow of just overly sexualized greasy fake gore flicks that take themselves way too seriously from being released. I think that the torture porn genre is kind of a one note joke in a way because as soon as you watch a torture porn flick you immediately are desensitized to the thrill and then the next flick you watch has to either top all the other stuff you’ve already seen or you’re just watching the same thing over and over again and there comes that boredom again. I would a thousand times over watch a shitty flick that is at least thinking somewhat outside the box, than watch a “good” one that is just doing the exact same thing over again.

The Loved Ones opens up rather innocently with a father and son in a car, the son being the driver, who are jesting back and forth about music, and the father says that he doesn’t want to listen to “that wrist cutting shit” that his son apparently listens to (this factors in later on in the movie). As the pair drive on, a bloodied man staggers onto the road, the son swerves to avoid him and crashes the car into a tree, killing his father in the process, despite the fact that they weren’t really going that fast, but that’s fine, I’m no car crash expert. Flash to a few months down the line and this kid is all fucked over because he killed his own Dad and has gone emo to the tits about it.. Apparently grunge didn’t die in Australia because this kid is rocking the Kurt Cobain look hard.

Also apparently for whatever reason this kid (who is named Brent) is also something of a teen dream at his high school because he has a pretty foxy girlfriend, which really sets this flick into fantasy land because in my experience foxy ladies don’t slum around with emotionally crippled self mutilators who listen to Metallica and wear flannel shirts. We also see Brent get asked to the dance by an additional girl who is pretty cute in that girl next door way, but he turns her down.. probably because the dumb bitch he’s currently seeing is letting him touch her poonanny for whatever reason.

And for whatever additional reason, Brent’s creepy little friend asks a pretty sexy goth girl to the prom and she also agrees to go with him.. I don’t really know. Whatever though, there should always be more goth girls in films so I’m down with it..

Onwards and upwards we are treated to seeing Brent fingerblasting his foxy girlfriend in the backseat of her car while being watched by the strange girl whose invitation to the dance he had turned down, which was pretty creepy. Could you imagine trying to get all Barry White with your mate while this looks in on you:

.. that’s enough to kill the mood right there, so lucky for those sexy teens, neither of them notices and they proceed to presumably fuck the shit out of each other despite the fact that Brent is wearing a fucking razorblade around his neck that he uses to hack himself up like a Thanksgiving turkey.. Good god, if the flannel shirts didn’t send that girl running, that Hot Topic necklace should have..

Anyways later on at home Brent has a freak out and decides to go be emo outside and smokes some cannabis, cuts his hands a bit and just chills out for a while with his dog looking hazy eyed into the distance. Just as Brent is really starting to enjoy his buzz he is ambushed from behind, subdued and kidnapped. He wakes up in a suit, tied to a chair in the home of the girl whose dance invitation he had turned down, Lola Stone. Turns out the joke was on Brent because Lola’s fucking crazy, and so is her Dad, and Daddy has arranged his own private homecoming dance for his little princess.

..aaand sitting at the table with them is a lobotomized woman that the pair refers to as ‘Bright Eyes’. Lola injects Brent’s voicebox with bleach and renders him unable of making any sounds and Lola under the supervision of her Daddy-O starts tormenting Brent, trying to force some pretty greasy looking chicken into his mouth, and the making him suck her finger:

Fact of the matter is that Lola Stone is fucking crazy town.. singing lullabys and wearing this garish pink Barbie doll dress with matching hideous pumps and this crazy pink eyeshadow that sort of makes her look like she has a fucking gnarly case of conjunctivitis or some shit. At some point she makes Brent piss into a jar and gets all creepy about licking drops of urine off his penis.. and really if you woke up and this was happening to you wouldn’t you just realize how absolutely fucked you were? If someone is talking to the piss coming out of your flaccid teenage penis then yeah they are probably going to torture you, kill you for sure and more than likely potentially eat you. I would rather get shivved for crack money than have someone sing me lullabys while they talk to my genitals.

Well, despite looking he stepped off the set of Clueless, our friend Brent full on kicks Lola right in the chest and does manage to escape outside and up a tree, but is dragged back into the house where Lola carves her initials into his chest and throws salt on him, all while laughing/screaming/crying/generally making a huge amount of noise and being just balls to the wall bananaphone crazy which I enjoyed because for one it’s over the top, but its not overdone like the meticulously silent crazed killer. It invokes a little bit of Freddy, that is if Robert Englund donned a pretty pink dress instead of that janky striped sweater and for whatever crazy reason, it worked. There is just the right amount of humor to make the whole thing quirky and tongue in cheek without it just being a mockery of itself.

Through all this immense teenage racket we discover that little Lola has been abducting and torturing boys for a long time (like father like daughter I suppose), and the boy who staggered into the road and caused Brent to have a car accident was actually one of her earlier victims who had escaped, and was also coincidentally the brother of that sexy goth girl (who is also apparently all fucked up over the loss of her sibling and this may potentially be the reason she let that mouth breather take her to prom).

After being crowned Queen of her fucked up little janky ass kitchen torture dance with a pink paper crown from a party cracker (apparently Daddy didn’t love her enough to get her a real tiara), she tells Brent that she has been torturing boys in order to find her prince, but Brent is just another frog, and she confesses that her father is her true prince and she grabs ahold of Daddy and they have this horribly creepy incestuous dance to that fucking “Am I Not Pretty Enough?” song by Kasey Chambers, which WILL get stuck in your head, make no mistake and you’ll be humming it to yourself while you’re doing the dishes and have a horrible moment where you start questioning your life choices..

The two of them almost kiss, I swear to Christ and I was hiding behind my hands, kicking my feet and shrieking “IF THEY KISS THAT’S IT I QUIT I’M DONE”, which is normal completely appropriate behavior and possibly the reason my neighbor smokes so much dope these days… I bet he’s just sitting next door going “Oh it must be movie night, time to break out the bong”.. I was once told my laughter was something between a witches cackle and nails on a chalkboard, so there’s that. Anyways. GROSS.

Brent, the crafty little shit, puts his Hot Topic necklace to good use and manages to start sawing through the ropes binding his wrists, but not after Lola drills a hole in his skull into which she intends to pour boiling water.. Comfortably Numb anyone?

Also at this time we see that hottie goth girl and Brent’s creepy friend sitting outside the prom and I swear they smoke like 6 joints each and power drink a 26oz of whiskey between them and then they randomly go and have a sexy little dance, and then go and have strange naked time in the backseat of the car.. I mean yeah sex, drugs and rock and roll, but this whole sequence could have easily been removed from the movie and the film would have been fine.. Also, did anyone wonder how those two were even standing let alone having a sexy dance? If I smoked 3 joints to myself and drank 13oz of whiskey I’d be a fucking mess and not a sexy hot mess, but potentially a really sketchy looking cotton mouthed one. Wino for life, mother fuckers.

Lola’s Dad pulls open a trapdoor in the kitchen to reveal their previous lobotomized abductees living like animals, and Lola has to have her Dad widen the hole in Brent’s head so she can pour in some boiling water..

This whole scene to me was so Jeffrey Dahmer it hurt me, I loved it. If you like reading, check out the Joyce Carol Oates book “Zombie”, based on Dahmer and it’s crazy good and has some pretty good head drilling scenes in it. During this time though, Brent manages to free himself and puts an end to Daddy by stabbing him in the neck. The gore is half decent for me, not so over the top it’s crappy, but its just good all around so I did enjoy that. Lola comes at Brent but he knocks that bitch out, and she takes a fucking pretty good schwack right to the face, and Brent throws Daddy into the pit where the near starved abductees begin to eat his corpse.

Paralyzed by horror, Brent doesn’t see Lola come up behind him in order to throw his ass into the pit where he quickly dispatches the hungry abductees with a hammer she also randomly threw down to him, while trying to hit him. Lola tells him, all crazy like, that she’s going to go kill his Mother and foxy girlfriend and with nothing more than a kitchen knife and her scrapbook of crazy she takes off leaving Brent alone in the pit, but not before killing a police officer who attempted to come to Brent’s aid by putting a meat cleaver into his face.

Brent being a smart little emo makes a big pile of bodies and climbs out of the pit as his girlfriend drives to his rescue on the hunch that she knew about Lola’s invitation and subsequent rejection, and probably went, “Dang that bitch would probably kill people..”

Lola has taken off down the road and is quite literally walking in bare feet while carrying her screaming pink fuck me pumps to go and kill Brent’s family, which really says something because from what I can understand, Lola and her Dad live out kind of in the ass end of nowhere, so for someone to walk on foot to go and murder another is pretty crazy. I mean there’s lots of people I’d like to kill but I’d probably want a getaway car or something..

Anywho, as Brent’s foxy girlfriend Holly (i realize this is the first time I have used her name) drives to his rescue, Lola throws her scrapbook at the car, which distracts Holly just long enough for Lola to get into the car and attack her. There’s a pretty sexy catfight that ensues as Lola tries desperately to murder her, and a chase scene ensues..

Brent meanwhile has taken the dead police officer’s car and is driving desperately to save his Mother and woman from the wrath of Lola. He sees Holly on the road, nearly kills her and ends up running over Lola instead (ironnnnyy). As he and his woman tearfully reunite they are alerted to the sound of Lola still desperately dragging her half dead body down the road to possibly attempt to kill them or just make grindy knife on pavement noises.. who knows?

Anyways, Brent does the old Stephen King special and backs the fuck over Lola and ends her life of crazy.

Let me say right here that if the movie ended at this point I would have been fine with it, but it actually ends after Brent and his mother embrace which I kinda didn’t dig? I don’t really know, I’m still on the fence about it and pretty well just pretending it ends when he backs over Lola’s face. Which can I say that bitch takes a fucking beating to her goddamn face like no other, I guess that Mike Tyson quote about everyone having a plan until they get punched in mouth doesn’t ring too true for this little prom queen.

Okay so the movie was a hardcore win for me, and not even because it was really that great. It had okay gore but was definitely unbelievable at a lot of points, but it takes that torture porn genre and flips it – having a female in the role of the sadistic killer is something that has been done before (see Urban Legend, the first Friday the 13th, Bride of Chucky, Jennifer’s Body, Hard Candy, High Tension, Ginger Snaps etc), but it’s the tongue in cheek without being cheesy aspect that gives the movie a refreshing feel and makes Lola believable and actually downright pretty scary.

Teenage girls ARE FUCKED. I know, I once was one, and if you were a teenage goth girl like me, then you probably thought about killing people a whole bunch which isn’t necessarily healthy, but let’s be real here.. Everyone likes to think sometimes, hypothetically about how they’d like to really fuck over their enemies, their exes or whatever, obviously not with the intention of actually going through with said ideas, but it still happens, whether you want to punch out your neighbor, watch your exboyfriend die in a fire, or piss on someone’s grave.

Anyways, I really liked this flick, there’s not much more to say about it than that, but I guess I’m just a sucker for a crazy girl in a pink dress. On a final note, I had this movie described to me as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Pretty in Pink and for anyone curious, that is a pretty accurate description.

Until next time cool cats, stay spooky and drink mead!