Rating: C
Dir: Liam Regan.
Star: Lyndsey Craine, Lala Barlow, Vito Trigo, Emily Haigh.
When it’s patently obvious that a film is trying to be offensive and push buttons, I tend to find it doesn’t work. It feels like a kid yelling out swear words, because he knows it’ll provoke a reaction, rather than using them properly in context. It feels like Regan is better than that. There’s enough on view to suggest he has talent and skill to do more than take lazy potshots at sacred cows. There are certainly ideas in here. I just wish the film could have been arsed to commit to them. For instance, newly turned 18-years-old Beth Conner (Craine) being set up as a sacrificial victim to her cannibal parents? Gets five minutes, tops.
There’s even the idea that Beth is ricocheting through a multiverse of movies. But we only get to see this one because, as a goth cliché, she is inevitably stuck in B-grade horror. Which here means, a contest to win a handgun you can use, either to kill yourself or carry out a school shooting. The oft-repeated phrase, “Nostalgia is cancer”, except the film itself is largely nostalgic, drawing heavy influence from Heathers, in the shape of mean girl Clarissa (Haigh) and her posse. It’s filmed in Yorkshire, which makes the fascination with school massacres weirdly anachronistic. I don’t think there have been any in the UK since Dunblane, thirty years ago. [There were hardly any before it either, despite people crediting the post-Dunblane crackdown as a model of gun control] To find a pupil-instigated one, you need to go back even further.
So it’s all rather messy and disjointed. Yet bits and pieces of it work, such as Beth proclaiming, “Screw Troma movies”, immediately followed by a caption telling us that, “The opinions expressed in this movie are solely those of Beth Connor and do not represent the views of the filmmakers.” Or the mercifully brief Lloyd Kaufman cameo, yelling “Alec Baldwin!” before shooting himself in the face. Too soon, considering this premiered ten months after that incident? Probably – and I wouldn’t have Troma operating any other way. In Craine, the film has a central presence always worth watching, Beth operating as a weird moral fulcrum for the film. This is despite the contradiction between being vegan, and eating her classmates or the titular teacher (Barlow), on whom she has a crush.
I dunno, maybe it makes more sense if you have seen Regan’s previous film, My Bloody Banjo, which seems to operate in the same universe? This deserves credit for appearing to swim against the tide of socially conscious horror, but still leans heavily into obviously meta commentary. “We all know nudity in the horror genre is only there to appeal to the lowest common denominator… If this was an A24 film, it would be classed as brave and progressive.” But I’m unclear why I should give a fuck about the director’s opinions on anything. Still, expecting subtlety from a Troma movie is clearly a fool’s errand. And again, I hope they never change.