Rating: B-
Dir: Tesh Guttikonda, Mitch Oliver
Star: Amanda Fix, Matthew MacCaull, Brenna Llewellyn, Elyse Levesque
Normally, I try and avoid spoilers, but I’m going to make an exception here. So, I would strongly recommend you go and watch this first, then come back here. Because a lot of the fun is in the way this reverses expectations, and yanks the carpet out from under you. It was certainly the case for Chris, who within ten minutes was pronouncing she knew exactly where this was going to go. It was all I could do to bite my tongue and wait. She’s not often wrong in these things, so when she is, I want to revel in the situation. And here, she was so very, very wrong. It was glorious.
I can’t blame her though: the setting is deliberately crafted to look like something we’ve seen a million times before. A Californian family – father Keith (MacCaull), mother Kathleen (Levesque), and their teenage children Amy (Fix) and Jeffery – are travelling through rural America, when they meet two brothers who couldn’t be more sterotypically redneck if they tried. They leer at Amy, and one invites himself into the mobile home, which is when Chris went full doomer. Right up until Jeffrey stabs their visitor in the neck. Turns out, it’s the tourists who are the psycho cannibals, rather than the locals. They end up at the nearby Cleary farm, and are given a warm welcome by the unwitting hosts, who don’t realize they are on the menu.
It’s a glorious reversal, and for a while I wondered if both clans would end up being predators. It doesn’t go that far, and instead the intent is closer to Tucker and Dale, in terms of playing against stereotype – though the focus here is on horror not humour. There is some unexpected social subtext, Keith sneering, “These people don’t have dreams. They have no reason to be alive. If anything, we’re doing them all a favor” – language close to how the coastal elite describe those in flyover country. Unfortunately, things are derailed by making Savannah a lesbian, because 2024. This leads to a lengthy side-plot where she seduces Savannah Cleary (Llewellyn). While I’m as keen on seeing teenage girls make out as the next guy, here it’s an unnecessary diversion.
For it then plays into a soapy strand where Keith is shocked – shocked! – by the revelation of his daughter’s sexuality. This seems to have strayed in from a bad CW show, though does give us the line, “I’d rather eat pussy than people!” It doesn’t make sense in the context (most Cali-liberals would love to have an LGBTQIA+ child) and is entirely negated by the ending. Shame, since the film does almost everything else right, not least some impressive gore including an arrow to the neck and eyeball removal (top). While the gratuitous gayness stops it from ranking among the best horror this year, it still manages to fly to the top of the Tubi Originals I’ve seen. Confounding Chris was just a bonus.