Maybe cause I watched it in an exhausted not in a good mood, and was vulnerable and fell into it. The story and editing is better then the acting. It is an interesting semi hallucinatory situation about making impossible choices.
The lack of gore was a relief to me because I was in no mood to see nice people being ripped apart in forensic detail today. But in this movie gore is always imminent, always, and the romance scenes are presented as hallucinatory flashbacks in the midst of a person being dismembered, a guy whose dismemberment is all that is preserving his lover's dismemberment...his choice....and the denouement, the final resolution works...It's definitely a horror movie when you realize what's really going on during these "romantic" moments, and in most low budget horror flicks .....the amateurs playing the victims are such wretched actors and actresses, and are deliberately unsympathetic, so we root for the sadist or demonic presence and the gore , excessive, graphic, and preposterous, is the balm, the release from the preceding and formulaic tension. . In this case, there was enough character development with the victims so that I made book on them and was satisfied with the resolution to the core premise.
More gore would have weakened the movie because , as in the case of the ancient surgical practice of trepining, or any bloodletting, a motive of "cutter's" in mental hospitals is actually relief. It's the gore faucet that releases tension and ends that scene....but here you don't fully get that satisfaction and the violence is always hovering...the only relief is false, a victim so tortured that the sweet memories he has are really the result of an agony- wracked mind....and we know that , so there is really no release, just waves of tension and frustration, but that's if you let the movie work on you a little bit.
This one is easy to be critical of, if you want, mainly because while the acting is good, I would not call it a virtuoso piece. It is original, I found it disturbing so it penetrates..........it is NOT 5 teenagers being chased through the woods by a deformed machete wielding nut job with the victims predictably being picked off one by one, each body containing about 500 litres of blood etc.....that is NOT what horror is about. Horror, to me anyhow, is about the individual you can relate to and sort of like, rendered helpless and being subjected to, as this movies sadist clarifies, the unspeakable. You get sucked into identification with the victim here, not the alpha monster avenging itself, the monster more sympathetic then the brats it picks off. I think it was Poe's "Premature Burial" where he he discusses the awe of true horror always made more terrible in the agony of the individual. More horrible to read about the unbelievable agonies of a specific person, then about 7000 people dying in an earthquake.
Way to much thinking on this thing. But worth watching. I think it manages to do what it's designed to do effectively and creatively. Good Movie.
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