Well hello there you little heathens.  We drunks here in the graveyard have a special little something for you to feast your disgusting selves upon – Scotty Floronic and myself decided to make the drunk beast with two backs and in the words of GHOST “come together as one” to write a review for Jug Face.  Oh yeah.  It’s a thing.

Allow me to set the stage here for you – Jug Face wasn’t really on the menu for our viewing..  I came home late from work after a night of my mental patients being mental patients and telling me in great detail about Satan and dead babies and Scotty had plans for us to watch Curtains, seeing as how it was featured on this month’s Rue Morgue magazine.  Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for you fuckwads about to read this review, tape we had was noisey and unwatchable.  Shame.  So like most things we turned to Netflix, to shelter us under its warm bosom of hot garbage and we had both been pondering watching Jug Face.  the hour was late and desperation upon us, so allow me to grant unto you…

Our review of this fucking shitshow.

 

Robin

So the backstory with Jug Face is that once upon a midnight dreary, some settlers in the backwoods stumbled upon a pit in the ground and somehow decided that this pit would keep them safe and healthy if they performed ritual human sacrifice in it’s name, when the pit asked of course..  and how does a hole in the ground request human sacrifices in its name you might ask – well through backwoods shamans known as “potters” who make moonshine jugs in the likeness of those selected to die.

I’ll let that sink in for a moment.

So, uh, yeah..  that’s a real thing.  I’m sure there’s some deep (like a hole in the ground, get it?) metaphor in there, or some comment on the futility of organized religion or some Burzum esque rantings about how silly the idea of God is because God can be anything, and for these folks it’s a hole in the ground..  but you know what, I’m gonna walk the classy high road here and not even go there.  I just can’t.  It’s too much.

So.  Story starts with Ada, a greasy backwoods hill billy girl wandering around in the woods as you do when you are uneducated and she of course gets talked into banging some belligerently sexy dude..  which hey – when you have no education and nothing else to do but drink moonshine, why not engage in a little fucking in the great outdoors.  Ada has a disappointing pair of bewbs, likely because she has eyes like Puss n Boots from Shrek and you can’t be doe – eyed and huge titted all at once.  Doesn’t really work that way.

Anyways, after some forest nasty, we the viewers find out that..  well it wasn’t a hillbilly boyfriend she had, but rather her own brother (gross).  She wanders home with her panties full of the same DNA she has inside her body (also gross) and finds out she is to be “joined” (read: wed) to some doughy ass dude from one of the like three other families who lives in this hole in the ground place (get it?  SEE WHAT I DID THERE).  Anyways, Ada is pretty bummed about this because it means she won’t be able to bang her bro anymore what with having to climb aboard the Pillsbury whale and go to town on him after their wedding ceremony (read: backyard kegger).  She gets all bent out of shape about it and other women in the community start accusing her of being a slut, insinuating that she doesn’t have a hymen anymore and won’t pass some random virginity test (like a breathalyzer I would assume..  Excuse me Ma’am, I’m just here doing a roadside virginity test, can you step out of the car and your panties please?)

So she does what any person would do and goes and finds some red paint to put in her panties (how she found the room with her brother’s baby batter all up in there, I am not so sure, but hey..  weirder shit has happened) and then she tells her mother she has her period (continuing to be gross).

Also, if you’re thinking that you recognize that foxy hill billy up there, you’re right..  you do.  Because that lady up thurr is also Lieutenant Einhorn from the Ace Ventura movie.

Anywho, shortly after airing out her dirty laundry (AND AGAIN!), Ada takes a wander in the woods to go visit Dawai, the Potter, the hill billy equivalent of a shaman who makes moonshine jugs in the likeness of those to be sacrificed to the pit, and who also looks like he should be in Mumford and Sons or modelling for Urban Outfitters.

Dawai, like all of the Potters before him, goes into a trance like state while under the influence of moonshine and makes these jugs and as Ada approaches his run down shit shack in the woods, she finds in his kiln, a jug with her face on it and seeing as how, who wants to die for a hole in the ground, she decides to hide the jug.

Ada, also finds out that she is pregnant, with her brother’s incest baby and also that Dawai made a moonshine jug with the creepiest fucking fetus on it..  I swear to god..  I was losing my fucking mind.  Thats not the type of thing you find at the Christmas craft fairs, let me tell you.  An ole fetus jug would be mighty out of place amongst grandma’s preserves and knitted doilies, I’m just saying.  First of all, if someone isn’t actually making fetus jugs, that’s an etsy shop just waiting to happen and a market waiting to be tapped.  Like my grandma always used to say – Build a fetus jug and they will come..  to drink moonshine out of it.  She knew her shit, my grandma..

Lieutenant Einhorn gives Ada a roadside virginity test and Ada doesn’t pass, but it just ends in her screaming that she likes to masturbate, so that was cool I guess.

So Ada decides to protect her baby and of course doesn’t fess up to Dawai that she’s carrying around a likely genetic mutation and tells him to make a jug from memory and he rolls up the next day with a doughy jug face and well it’s curtains for Ada’s tubby husband to be.

Anywho, Ada tells her bro she’s carrying his bastard child and he’s all “tough shit” and she of course doesn’t know what to do about and soon she starts having visions..  first of a friend of hers dying..  and bingo she wakes up to this same boring ass friend, ripped to shreds.

Turns out, that the pit..  “wants what it wants”, meaning that when your number is called, the jig is up and you’ve gotta pay the piper..  Apparently the pit keeps these folks all clean and safe and happy and when your number is up, you go gently into that..  good hole.

Ada’s brother and also baby daddy Jessaby, tells his Dad that he is sick and he needs to go have a wash in the pit to make himself better and his dad takes him out to the hole, and instead of being cured, the creature in the pit rips Jessaby apart.

Dawai is brought before the community for not coming through on his work as the Potter and tied next to the hole as an offering.

Ada visits her sickly grandfather and meets up with a bunch of CGI that she refers to as The Shunned, a ghost that tells her that once upon a time her grandfather hid his wife’s jug face and was poisoned as a result.

Ada decides to make a break for it and escape with Dawai.  The two run off to the nearest town where they try desperately to sell some moonshine to the locals for cash, and no one is buying, which is bullshit because someone could ring my doorbell at 4am with moonshine and I’d go straight to the ATM, so that’s just some stone cold bullshit right there.

The dude she was trying to sell the moonshine to calls Ada’s father who drives out to the town and promptly picks up her and Dawai and takes them back to the town and brutally beats both of them.  Ada is beaten so badly she miscarries her baby.  Her father tries to be gentle and tells her that she should have been up front about banging Dawai (which she didn’t) and she confesses to them that it was actually her brother’s baby and both of her parents lose their goddamned minds about it because they think thats the grossest thing ever, basically.  These people who worship a hole in the ground and perform human sacrifice draw the line at incest.  They aren’t the incest type of hillbillies, no siree.

Ada also confesses that it was her jug face that Dawai had originally made and that she hid it because she didn’t want to die.

She shows her family the jug and they of course beat the shit out of her and so Ada ends up tied up next to Dawai in the woods, and she again has a vision, but this time it is her father who dies, and he ends up the same as the others..

In this totally fucked community, if you die without having been chosen as the jug face, you become “shunned” and are sentenced to a purgatory of wandering around as a CGI nightmare which seems pretty shitty, but hey at least you wouldn’t be worshipping a hole in the ground anymore.  Ada is visited by the ghostly bunch of CGI and her ailing grandfather who offer to help her escape.  Knowing that Dawai will be killed if she runs, she opts to instead stay and greets the dawn of a new day with a slit throat bleeding into the hole in the ground loved by her community.

End shot of Dawai lighting candles next to her jug face.

The thing is, I actually kind of liked this movie at the start – I liked the whole backwoods weird hillbilly religion thing and even got behind some of the cheesiness of it all.  I thought the story had a pretty good flow until after the second peak of action when Ada is brought back to the community.  the director and writer didn’t really seem to know where to go with the story and it just took a shit on itself for the ending.  The ending is really weak and seems pretty phoned in – I wasn’t digging it.  But what do you expect from the same producer as our staff favourite movie to hate on – Sinister.  Sinister had the same problem – good story, but got way way too goofy, didn’t know how to wrap up and just went for a literal and proverbial shit of wet diarrhea into the audience’s collective gaping maw.

I still recommend it for a late night, nothing’s on tv, viewing, but it doesn’t appear to stand up under any kind of scrutiny..  Good to see Lieutenant Einhorn is still around though.

 

 

Scotty

I really like hillbilly/backwoods horror movies. Something about the setting, aside from striking close to home (there’s quite the redneck population in my town), has always interested me. There’s just something about the combination of the isolation that’s inherent in the backwoods setting, not knowing how many people might be after you, or if you can even trust anyone you might go to for help that really ups the horror factor for me. That’s why when I first became aware of Chad Kinkles Jug Face it immediately went on my ‘To Watch’ list. You know the list; you probably have one yourself. You just keep tacking movies onto it in the hope that one day you might find time enough to actually sit down and watch them. Just my luck then that technology basically dumped Jug Face in my lap courtesy of Netflix in one of their recent updates. Unfortunately, Jug Face wasn’t ready to come out of the kiln quite yet.

 

In Jug Face, we follow Ada (played by Lauren Ashley Carter) as she does what most of us city folk imagine are everyday backwoods activities: washing clothes down by the crik, killing small animals with motor vehicles so you can eat them for dinner and of course fuckin’ your brother. It’s this last one that’s the impetus to the story. Because no one ever taught these yokels about the tried and true pull out method (’cause if you NEED to copulate with people in your family, AT LEAST try to not make flipper babies), Ada ends up with one in the oven. During this time, she also happens to find a jug face (literally that – a jug with a face on it) that resembles her, signaling that she is to be sacrificed to the pit. What is the pit exactly? Well, I watched the whole movie and truth be told I’m not entirely sure myself. We’re told that the backwoods community in that area worship a creature in the pit and that blood sacrifices need to be made to it to keep it happy but this is really all the information we are provided with.

 

Anyhow, back to Ada and her crockery. Finding said jug of her own face, she hides it in fear for both hers and her flipper baby fetus’s lives. Of course, this interrupts the way of the pit and it starts randomly killing people, presumably out of anger. Or punishment. Or because it doesn’t give a fuck. I wish I knew because WE GOT NEXT TO NO DETAIL about the ‘thing’ at the bottom of the muddy redneck hole. It’s about this time Ada starts seeing the ghost of a little boy, a victim of the pit from the last time someone hid a jug face, warning her that until she gives herself to the pit, the random killing will continue. Oh, and she gains the ability to see through the eyes of the pit creature as well around this point. Why? No idea, they never took the time to expand on this. After a fair amount of people are both randomly killed by the pit monster and sacrificed to it in an attempt to appease it, Ada finally fesses up to hiding the her jug face. Up until this point, the glue of being a creepy, backwoods redneck horror that was holding this thing together basically dissolves into nothing, giving us an ending that falls flat and just kind of leaves you empty handed.

 

I really wanted to give this movie a good review, and honestly, up until the ¾ mark it IS a fairly decent backwoods horror flick. It’s the resolution (or lack of one) that really washes this one down the toilet like a dirty old flipper baby fetus. Gross. Jug Face has some really cool ideas I wish they had taken the time to expand upon, especially the whole Aztec style blood sacrifice to appease a god figure but ultimately it just kind of squanders the good elements with a lazy non-conclusive ending. Jug Face is worth a watch if you dig backwoods horror, but be prepared to have more questions than answers at the end of it.

 

So until next time – never trust anyone who worships a hole in the ground, don’t have sex with your family members, drink moonshine and always always ALWAYS STAY SPOOKY.