I'm undecided on this one. First, let me say that the soundtrack is completely inappropriate, intrusive and distracting. When Cleek first encounters The Woman it should have been a silent and nervous scene, even erotic, but instead we get some whiny and unconnected college rock crap that adds nothing. All the songs in the film suck.
Let's not forget that the premise of this is absurd to the point of hilarity. Look honey, I found this savage woman wandering the woods. Let's keep her and train her to be a proper girl, just like in Pygmalion. Only much worse. OK, so he gets her home and she bites his finger off. His reaction? 'Ouch!' That's it. He yelps for a second then puts a plaster on it. Now, I assume we are expected to surmise from this that he is a psychopath and impervious to pain, like Raymond Lemorne in The Vanishing, but he carries none of the menace and his sleek professional face is just a little too slick. The look on The Woman's face as she crunches his finger is priceless though.
So on to his family, a bunch of one dimensional caricatures lorded over by this smiling psycho, that makes me think that this is an attempt at a dysfunctional family black comedy like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but there's just too much that's set up and obvious. None of the characters are believable and it's impossible to sympathise with them, especially the mother. Her character has a perfectly good chance to put a stop to the disaster she can see coming, but chickens out and actually perpetuates it.
The gore factor of this is negligible, so forget that too. And why does the daughter lie about her brother masturbating when he was torturing The Woman? It makes little sense, especially as she appears to empathise and identify with The Woman, who can apparently sense that she is pregnant. The ending is baffling too. I can see what the storyteller was trying to say: the modern nuclear family doesn't work, so a return to savagery and primitivism is the way to survive, but again, its too trite and obvious an ending and it just sort of fizzles out. The fathers death, a good opportunity for some real payback, is rendered powerless with the clichéd 'tear your heart out and eat it' scene.
There are few saving graces to this film. The soundtrack is awful, the gore is blah, the characters are flat and unbelievable, the misogyny is delivered like a sledgehammer (yeah, men are bastards. we get it) and the moral, such as it is, is typical 'tack and ending on before we run out of money' fodder. Imagine company of Wolves, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and an elongated episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but without the production values and you're about there. The only thing that made this worth watching was Pollyanna McIntosh. She owns the screen and conveyed more drama with a look or a smile than the rest of the cast put together.
I didn't hate this, but I suffered it until the end for Pollyanna. A begrudged 6/10
Let's not forget that the premise of this is absurd to the point of hilarity. Look honey, I found this savage woman wandering the woods. Let's keep her and train her to be a proper girl, just like in Pygmalion. Only much worse. OK, so he gets her home and she bites his finger off. His reaction? 'Ouch!' That's it. He yelps for a second then puts a plaster on it. Now, I assume we are expected to surmise from this that he is a psychopath and impervious to pain, like Raymond Lemorne in The Vanishing, but he carries none of the menace and his sleek professional face is just a little too slick. The look on The Woman's face as she crunches his finger is priceless though.
So on to his family, a bunch of one dimensional caricatures lorded over by this smiling psycho, that makes me think that this is an attempt at a dysfunctional family black comedy like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but there's just too much that's set up and obvious. None of the characters are believable and it's impossible to sympathise with them, especially the mother. Her character has a perfectly good chance to put a stop to the disaster she can see coming, but chickens out and actually perpetuates it.
The gore factor of this is negligible, so forget that too. And why does the daughter lie about her brother masturbating when he was torturing The Woman? It makes little sense, especially as she appears to empathise and identify with The Woman, who can apparently sense that she is pregnant. The ending is baffling too. I can see what the storyteller was trying to say: the modern nuclear family doesn't work, so a return to savagery and primitivism is the way to survive, but again, its too trite and obvious an ending and it just sort of fizzles out. The fathers death, a good opportunity for some real payback, is rendered powerless with the clichéd 'tear your heart out and eat it' scene.
There are few saving graces to this film. The soundtrack is awful, the gore is blah, the characters are flat and unbelievable, the misogyny is delivered like a sledgehammer (yeah, men are bastards. we get it) and the moral, such as it is, is typical 'tack and ending on before we run out of money' fodder. Imagine company of Wolves, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and an elongated episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but without the production values and you're about there. The only thing that made this worth watching was Pollyanna McIntosh. She owns the screen and conveyed more drama with a look or a smile than the rest of the cast put together.
I didn't hate this, but I suffered it until the end for Pollyanna. A begrudged 6/10