Inbred

I think I’m too old for these fun and bloody hixploitation flicks. Inbred is a well made, undemanding snack, no more, no less; there are millions like it and I’m saturated. A couple of years ago I would’ve given it four stars, but today I dismiss it with a wave of my hand and forget about it. But if you fancy a fairly decent dose of redneck fun, go for it. 5.5/10 (19.10.2012)

The essential shortcoming of Inbred consists in its screenplay, which is based on the standard slasher model, but it also wants to offer up absurd and explicit gore humour in the style of Braindead and impress viewers with the bizarre atmosphere of repulsive perversion in the mould of Pink Flamingos and the horrors brought on by the disintegrating certainties of everyday reality along the lines of Calvaire. These fundamentally contradictory aspects simply cannot be combined in such a way that they would fit together. The slasher structure, in which the characters are introduced in the first third of the film and the danger that they face is developed in the subsequent third so that everything can culminate with the main character’s suspenseful struggle for survival, would work well with the horror atmosphere. For a parade of exceedingly bloody and disgusting attractions, however, this is a counterproductive narrative model in that it simply doesn’t allow the attractions to pile up from the very beginning. Furthermore, it is nonsense to force viewers to watch a handful of uninteresting characters for half an hour when everyone is only waiting to see what kind of perverse, degenerate rednecks the film is going to put before them. Perhaps the film’s creators had hoped that the result would be something resembling a grandiose remake of The Hills Have Eyes, but that film worked because it contained simple humour and all of the gore was extremely physical. The result of the attempt to create a blend of all forms of rednexploitation flicks is that Inbred is an inconsistent mish-mash that tries to be everything but, despite a lot of small ideas, it simply cannot measure up to the films that inspired it. (28.10.2012)