Rating: D
Dir: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
Star: Toby Poser, Zelda Adams, John Adams, Lulu Adams
This is testament to the absolute uselessness of Rotten Tomatoes. Somehow, this is 100% fresh there (and with no small number of reviews), to the point I actively had to double-check there aren’t two different movies with the same title. It was an utter grind to get through, right from the start where a legless guy recites a poem about a demon which might have been written by a Vogon. It goes on and on and on, before finishing to rapturous applause. This is what happens when… Well, y’know how it’s a red flag when the same person writes, directs and stars in a film? Well, there are THREE of them here. A full trio who can’t even.
I mean, fair play to the Adams family, as they style themselves – how amusing! – for making their own films, on their own dime. But, man, based off this, the results are difficult to watch. Disjointed, boring and self-indulgent. And those are the good points. Witness the sequence here where a supposed Depression-era period piece gets interrupted by what appears to be a music video for the family’s punk metal band. Like everything else in the film, to more rapturous applause, probably. And I say “period piece”, but the carnival workers here look far more likely to have strayed in from a Marilyn Manson concert, than off the boardwalk. Don’t get me started on the World War I reenactment flashbacks either, Exhibit A for not knowing your limitations.
For what it’s worth, the meandering plot has a family travelling the country in the 1930’s as part of a fair. There’s Seven (J. Adams), a veteran with PTSD – hence the flashbacks. His wife, Maggie (Poser), and their daughter, Eve (Z. Adams), who doesn’t speak, but sings, for reasons the film is deeply uninterested in explaining. As they travel the country, they also murder people unfortunate enough to get in their way, for extra cash. Or because they’re not good people, I dunno. There was nothing compelling my attention here, in plot or characters. I will say, some of the production design and cinematography had its moments, although I could have done without the switch to b&w, complete with faux film scratches. /rolls eyes
This is the kind of pretentious, “elevated” horror, with its head up its own arse, which Shudder drools over. It’s as if somebody read a poorly-translated synopsis of House of 1000 Corpses, and decided, “Yeah, I can knock that out, using the talent found around my kitchen table. But I’ll add unsubtle Satanic undertones, because everything’s better with those!” I knew I’d made a terrible mistake from the legless poetry opener, and it was more or less all downhill from there. Somehow, this ended up being a Tubi Original, but even by the uneven standard of those (with a couple of honourable exceptions, such as Lowlifes), this is a mess. Some family business needs to stay within the family, and not be aired for anyone else.