Final Girl Support Group

All proms come with power tools, right?

What better way to kick off the best month of the year than with a little blood-spattered love story?

Made in Australia in 2009 but just finding a release in the States now, The Loved Ones, written and directed by first-time filmmaker Sean Byrne, centers around Lola (Robin McLeavy), a shy young lady who asks cute but damaged Brent (Xavier Samuel from my new favorite shark movie, SHARK IN A GROCERY STORE!) to the prom.  Brent must say no – he’s in a relationship with a nice girl who’s helping him heal after a tragedy.  Lola, however, is not a lady who takes no for an answer.  So logically, the best way to deal with this rejection is to kidnap Brent, tie him up, dress him up in a tux, and subject him to various tortures?  It’s just like a normal prom, right?  It’s like Pretty in Pink by way of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (complete with a clever homage to the dinner/hammer scene).

This movie has a reputation for being gory, and that’s not a lie.  Brent suffers some serious brutality in the name of love and prom.  But the real star here isn’t the red stuff.  It’s the characters, especially Lola and her rather questionable relationship with her “Daddy.”  McLeavy as Lola is just terrific – completely unpredictable, petulant and demanding like a teenager, sexual like a grown woman, and totally, gleefully insane.  This girl knows she’s nuts, and is perfectly okay with it.  You know she’s going to hurt someone (the poster can tell you that), but you can never quite guess which direction of crazy Lola’s going next – and how extreme that mood swing will be.  But it’s all in the name of love, right?  She’s just looking for love!  And she has her family around to help her fulfill all her prom dreams.  Especially her Daddy.

John Brumpton as “Daddy”

Daddy, played with few words but incredible facial nuance by John Brumpton, brings the creepy so strong that even though Lola’s the one with the knife, it’s Daddy who you keep watching out of the corner of your eye.  And the two of them together give you a relationship that is absolutely unsettling (their cheerful yells of “We can’t hear you!” over Brent’s tortured screams is especially effective), but also strangely similar to a touching portrait of father and daughter.  You know, if father and daughter were both psychotic torture/murderers.  For them, this is like a game mixed with a sort-of romance that’s about as screwed up as it gets.  Again, Brumpton conveys so much of this wordlessly, and McLeavy excellently plays the knife edge (sometimes literally) of young-girl ignorance and womanly awareness.  And while it’s pretty damn obvious that Lola and Daddy’s feelings might be more than familial, with one possible exception, it’s not overplayed.

Maybe he’s okay…

As a director, Byrne makes some smart choices.  He creates likable characters – when Brent turns Lola down, it’s not because she’s a loser, it’s because he already has a girlfriend.  He doesn’t mock or torment her.  It’s a perfectly normal reason to say no to someone, and it makes his capture later that much more upsetting, because there’s no “jerk guy comeuppance” to enjoy.  This is an honestly nice guy with some shitty life experiences even before Lola; a tragedy from his past that not only helps him endure the impending tortures, but even gives him reason to suspect he deserves them.  It’s not “he’s a MAN, so he’s so tough and can handle all this torture stuff!” These are sympathetic and realistic character traits absent in most films in the genre.

Just another normal family dinner

There’s a lot more to this movie, such as a subplot with a couple actually attending the prom, but I don’t want to give too much away and spoil all the fun.  Personally, after the credits rolled, I kept remembering the scenes with Brumpton and McLeavy (and Samuel, but his character was a little out of it at the time).  These two give special meaning to the word dysfunctional, and you’ll enjoy watching them play it out.  As for Byrne, he can count me as someone who’ll be looking forward to what he does next.

Given how much derivative crap is out there, this wild, brutal and just plain crazy original is well worth your time.

It’s a touching story full of deep meaning, an intense love triangle and metaphors on the brevity of human life…oh wait, I must have been thinking of something else.  This is SUPERSHARK!

Since movies like Birdemic and anything by The Asylum has risen in popularity, it seems like many companies are jumping on the so bad it’s (hopefully) good bandwagon.  And while Supershark doesn’t quite make it to the spic standards of a Birdemic quality movie, it still sort of works.  Side note – I can’t believe I just put the words “Birdemic” and”quality” in the same sentence.

It’s all well and good until an offshore drilling team accidentally breaks through some prehistoric ice and releases a gigantic monster shark.  But this isn’t just any old monster shark – this supershark can fly AND it can walk on land using its front fins to propel it along!  Read this sentence again.  Fly and walk on land.  This movie should be amazing.  Of course, the shark was let loose by an evil oil company using evil chemicals, fronted by its evil leader Wade (former Duke of Hazzard John Schneider, wishing he had a mustache to twirl…no, really) and must be stopped by a disgraced marine biologist Kat Carmichael (Sarah Lieving) with the help of boat captain Skipper Chuck (Tim Abell), looking like a cheap Michael Madsen knockoff.  Because you CAN”T CLOSE THE BEACHES!  Somewhere in this is DJ Dynomite Stevens (former Good Times actor Jimmie Walker), who doesn’t serve any point that I can see other than to make loud, strange commentary on an indoor bikini contest and wear a variety of wacky getups.   I won’t give away too many spoilers of what happens (though if you watch the trailer you already know this), but there may or may not be a tank robot vs. shark battle.

Any movie in this vein would do well to adhere to the Corman school of filmmaking, which (to paraphrase) is if you go around 5 minutes without showing the monster, that’s too long.  Supershark tries to keep this in mind, even going so far as to just introduce characters for a minute only to have them eaten up by the shark.  And almost no one is safe, even characters that seem set up to be main characters/final girls.

Whee!!!

There’s not much point in critiquing the acting, the FX or the cinematography, because that’s not what you watch these movies for.  You watch them for shark, shark and more shark.  All shark all the time.  Sharks eating all sorts of crazy stuff.  So that’s what I’ll review.  The shark does eat a bunch, but not as many giant or crazy things as I would have liked.  It’s called Supershark, and it can fly – FLY!  It should be eating spaceships or something.  The walking bit is a little exaggerated – more like limply hopping across the beach moving its two front flippers.  But the idea in general is fun, and there are a few major edifices removed from the beach.  For the most part, the movie operates as you would expect, and there’s a fairly good amount of shark.  But then again, I always want to see more shark in movies like this.

Most awkward photo shoot ever.

And there’s a theme song, people.  A theme song.  With a funky bass line.  Seriously.

Look, I’m betting you already know if you’re going to watch this or not.  I knew I would be sitting down with my FGSG cohorts the day it came out, trying to guess how many minutes until the shark appeared (you don’t have to wait long).  Judged against others of its ilk, you could do worse than Supershark.

Low budget filmmaking usually calls to mind (with some notable exceptions) poor CGI, fair to poor acting, and bland storylines we’ve seen a hundred times before.  And then there’s Absentia, a movie that takes the little money it has and runs with it, creating an effectively scary, well written and well shot film that Hollywood wishes it still understood.  Absentia proves that you don’t need millions of dollars to make a good movie.  The movie may be cheap, but the scares sure aren’t.

All of the people on this poster are right.

It’s hard for us to review this movie, which is why we’re skipping a synopsis.  We’d rather just say “Go watch this, it’s awesome!” and hope you’d believe us, mainly because we’re right.  Also, we don’t want to give anything away.  Here’s what we can say:

The movie’s use of focus is excellent.  Seriously, it’s pretty damn amazing.  This cannot be emphasized enough.  Without giving too much away, there’s an actor with some simple makeup who, through the use of focus, becomes terrifying.  The first encounter and a scene involving a closet are especially effective.  The use of focus is such a huge help in building the tension – keeping this figure just out of focus, highlighting that it isn’t a natural part of the world.  It amazed us that something so basic was made so creepy just through camera work.  And it’s not just the creepy parts.  The use of focus (keeping certain things in or out of focus) even in traditional scenes keeps the movie off-kilter, keeps you looking and keeps you guessing.

Just as commendable as the use of focus is the lack of stings and cheap scares.  We aren’t an easy group to freak out, but there were definitely some unsettling scenes and moments that got to us.  And extra points for making a difficult premise work without seeming forced.  It’s an interesting take on folklore that isn’t often explored in the genre – a new spin on the missing person mystery.

Any criticisms? There is one shot of CGI that’s a little questionable, but even that isn’t fully in focus and is done pretty quickly, so it’s a minor issue at best.  Really, there’s not much wrong with this movie.

Do we recommend?  Umm…have you been reading this blog lately?  We LOVE this movie!  Get it, see it, then come back here and tell us your thoughts!

Jenny: I agree with everything Frosty says above. I just wanted to add that, along with films like Insidious and Lake Mungo, this is a perfect film for the squeamish horror fan that craves fear and atmosphere without the gore or extreme violence.

See it. See it now.