Almost Mercy

Almost Mercy (2015) is a movie I recently watched on Prime. The storyline follows two teenagers that are outsiders with only themselves as friends. As various buttons are pushed the young man explodes and is expelled from school. The two teenagers work together so he can gain his revenge on those responsible for him getting expelled.

This movie is directed by Tom DeNucci (Army of the Damned) and stars Bill Moseley (House of 1000 Corpses), Kane Hodder (Hatchet), Danielle Guldin (Gotham) and David Gere (Army of the Damned).

This cast is awesome. Mosley as a pastor and Kane Hodder as the gym teacher was hilarious. The history of Mercy is very well presented. This movie has nice coming of age and friendship elements then takes off like a bullet the last 25 minutes. There's an ax to the face scene that's excellent and some great blood splatter. There's also a legendary bondage scenes that's worth a viewing.

Overall this is a very fun film that's definitely worth your time. I would score this a strong 7.5/10 and strongly recommend it.

If you are expecting this to be your typical horror film, then turn away because you will be greatly disappointed. Without spoiling anything, this movie is simply a revenge movie. The movie is narrated through the view point of the main character Emily. Starting from her childhood to her adult years telling the story of her and her best friend Jackson.

The best way to describe this movie is imagine if director Quentin Tarantino rebooted the movie Clueless and turned it into a revenge movie you get this film. There is a lot of blood in this movie and a lot of narration.

Netflix listed this film in their Horror genre, but this movie was far from it. Despite this fact I did enjoy it. If you like movies like Trainspotting, you will probably enjoy this movie.

This film had an issue being a horror film, comedy or drama. It has all the elements with a ton a blood and killing.

From the opening narration to the twee overacting, it was hard to take any message on board from this film. It felt like the film betrayed itself and went out of its way to provide gratuitous violence. I'm not personally against violence in films but it seemed badly used.

The characters became annoying caricatures as the film progressed and the protagonist was impossible to sympathise with far too early on. It seemed almost cartoon-ish in the worst possible way at the end.

I understood the idea and thought it had genuine promise. It was let down by the fact that the film neither subscribed to being a horror, a comedy or a character study. Almost Mercy was stuck in a no man's land. It was attempting to be a dark comedy but achieving none of the depth and execution of a dark comedy. It was incredibly hard to like the main characters in any way despite being the 'weird' kid once upon a time.

I felt almost insulted at times by the constant tropes, it seemed lazy and unoriginal. Which completely took away its value as a 'quirky' indie movie.

The music was often clashing with the film itself. It annoyed me multiple times. Whether it was supposed to be jarringly juxtaposed, I don't know, but I felt that many songs were poor choices.

As a positive, the female lead put in a decent performance and I could definitely see her advancing. The camera work was great and I liked a lot of the shots.

I would not recommend this film, unfortunately.

South Greenwich, Rhode Island was an industrial town, but most of the industry is gone. Emily lives in the nice section of town, but to get home, she must deal with bullies. The good news, for Emily at least, is that Tony, one of the bullies, dies in a horrible incident involving his mother's cheating on her husband, which results in several deaths. And getting back to Emily, you have to wonder how she can live in such a nice house, since her mother mainly lies in bed and drinks or thinks about how to improve her appearance. Later it is revealed that her father isn't around much, so somehow he is paying for everything.

Emily narrates the movie, and we soon learn how Emily and Jackson became friends. Jackson moved to town with his family, although I'm not quite clear on why. I thought it was job-related and maybe it was. The important thing is that Jackson is the new weird kid at school. Emily also being a weird kid, she makes friends with Jackson. But we don't see much of their early years. We keep going back and forth from the past to the present, and then we don't see the early years of Emily and Jackson any more, until a flashback. The flashback involves their visit to the grave of Mercy Brown, a girl who went through a horrific experience nearly 100 years earlier and even after her death, her body is defiled. It's not pleasant. This is where the movie's title comes from.

What we know in the present, almost from the movie's start, is that there has been a massacre, and the news media are speculating about how such a thing could have happened.

We jump forward in time. Emily is a brooding teenager reading Sylvia Plath and "The Road". Jackson is on the football team but is still being treated like an outcast. And he has to come home and help take care of his paralyzed father who is angry with the world and drinks, smokes and does other stuff you'd rather not know about in his wheelchair, and having seizures or whatever you call it. And Jackson's getting quite tired of all of it. The coach is trying to help Emily straighten out her life, but she doesn't seem too interested.

Then both Jackson and Emily each have their own terrible experience that changes everything. For Jackson, it means the end of school. For Emily, it means the start of a struggle with drugs and alcohol which leads to an incident in which the principal considers his precious football players more important than Emily.

You think you will know what is going to happen. Most likely, you will be wrong.

I hope I have established by now that this is not appropriate for family viewing. In fact, it is about as far from appropriate for the whole family as you can get on broadcast TV. I can only describe what I saw, but I have reason to believe I didn't see everything. The sound went out a lot, and when this happened while we saw a character talking, the character's mouth was blurred. This happened a lot with Emily. She had a mouth on her.

But that's not the worst thing. You can clean up language. I think some of the violence may have been cleaned up too. Two characters listed in the credits were not shown, or at least I didn't see faces. I could see at least one body. And lots of blood. In another scene there was a curious edit that made it obvious the violence had been cut. Other violence I saw was only implied but it was still quite disturbing. And the aftermath in several scenes was also quite graphic.

If I haven't said enough, one couple (the man is married but not to the woman) is into S & M. Why in the world was there not an S in the V- chip rating? We already saw way too much violence and I don't think this counts as violence.

Oh, yes, and let's not forget the men who are into child porn. This is only suggested, but we know it's happening.

A few scenes had music. One scene had good classical music, though that was kind of depressing even if it was upbeat. A couple of other scenes had pleasant music. Several others had depressing folk music which was at least soft. But throughout most of the movie, "music" was the often loud garbage that people who wear all black enjoy (is that the right word? They hate everything).

Okay, now for the positives. There aren't nearly enough of these scenes but Emily and Jackson have a generally pleasant relationship. I like the scenes where they are just being friends. I mentioned the coach trying to help Emily, and that's a good scene too, with a good performance by the actor Kane Hodder.

The suspense builds as the movie progresses. You know what's going to happen, or believe you do, and it gets exciting.

And if I try to think of what is positive about the movie, Danielle Guldin's superior performance comes to mind. No, there's a lot negative about what she is going through and doing. But she's a pleasure to watch anyway.

Do I recommend this movie? If you like seeing villains get what's coming to them in the most graphic way possible, perhaps.