Mystery screener disc, what evil have you wrought? Like the tapes the hapless visitors to the cabin find in The Evil Dead of the professor reading aloud from the Necronomicon I think this screener,Coyote scrawled across it in black sharpie, unleashed something not entirely of this world into my house. I don’t know for certain what this movie was, or was supposed to be, but it was certainly affecting. The only movie I can really think to compare it to from the last however many years is Murder Set Pieces, even though I was in no way a fan of that train wreck of a movie. Why you ask? Well, about 60% of the time, myself and the friends who went through the experience of watching this movie with me were looking around at each other in a mixture of confused horror and disgust, certain we’d unleashed an ancient evil by pressing play on the DVD player. Unlike Murder Set Pieces though, Coyote didn’t seem to me a rambling attempt at being artistic that trips all over itself, but instead a genuine expression of horrific artistry.

With Coyote, Trevor Juenger delves deep into the nightmare world of sleep deprivation, delirious hallucinations and Cronenbergian body horror to deliver a low budget, high caliber art house bullet deserving of a viewing if you’re even remotely intrigued by twisted, horrific art house cinema. As I’ve mentioned  before in other reviews, I’m always more than willing to strike out to the fringes to find a movie that is truly out there, different, and makes people understand the outright power that film can have on the viewer. I’m happy to say Coyote is one such filmic weapon. It’s frantic camera work, editing and musical cues make it almost delirious experience to watch as you, the viewer, become as unable as the main character (Bill Oberst Jr.) to decipher the difference between reality and horrific fantasy. I always enjoy art films (even if I don’t always “get” them) especially in the horror genre because they are one of the most potent ways to delve deep into the psyche of both the filmmaker and, like all good art, the viewer. Coyote is no different and, unlike Thantanamorphose (which I watched earlier in the month), stuck with me much longer and the imagery presented is still snaking it’s way around my brain even now, a week later.

If you have the stomach, seek out Coyote and prepare to be introduced to a director whose name should be on the lips of many critics, bloggers and fans of twisted artistic horror stories everywhere.