Pig Hunt

After being generally pleased with Dark House, I was interested to see if the other movies in this year’s Fangoria Frightfest series held up also. Maybe I’m getting soft, or I’ve been so pummeled by the amateurish movies I’ve watched, but I was pleasantly surprised by the 2008 film Pig Hunt as well. It isn’t high art, but I had a good enough time with it.

Four friends from San Francisco (and one girlfriend) go on a hunting trip in rural northern California, looking for wild boar, on some property one of them inherited from a dead uncle. This seems a bit improbable, as no one in the group, with the exception of the legatee, knows anything about hunting, but I suppose people do stupid things. Once they reach the hunting grounds, they run into some rednecks (Who speak with Southern accents, of course, despite the NoCal location. This is universal, for some reason, and I guess if you made a movie set in rural China, the characters would speak Cantonese with an Arkansas twang.) who tell them stories of the Ripper, a giant man-killing hog, and join their hunting party, despite deep animosity between them and the former local, who seems to be an old friend and possibly a relative.

The hunt goes badly (What do you expect?) when they run into some murderous hippies using the area for growing marijuana (northern California is the center of illegal marijuana production in the United States), and one of the friends kills one of the rednecks. Soon the city-slickers are on the run from both the hillbillies and the flower children, who seem to worship Hawgzilla as a God.

The characters, for the most part, are the sort who are so blindly stupid you can’t understand how they’ve lived as long as they have. All the hunters get drunk and/or stoned before the hunt, which is not the greatest of ideas, and are pretty casual about accidentally pointing loaded guns at each other. (The scene where the lead goes to investigate a noise in the bush while everyone else points their guns at his back is unintentionally funny.) They are also the type who absolutely cannot keep their mouths shut. Contrary to popular belief, animals are not deaf, and can hear people talking in loud voices. This also comes into play when the crew is trying to hide from human pursuers, and can’t stop with the OH MY GOD I HOPE THEY DON’T FIND US dialogue. Stay quiet, and stay still and you might live. You’ve also got to wonder about someone who brings his pet dog on a wild boar hunt, which I can’t imagine someone doing unless they really hate their dog.

You might also scratch your head about just how vicious hippies would be after spending all their time smoking incredibly potent weed, but hey, maybe it’s a variety Mary Louise Parker doesn’t sell.

For all that, I thought the movie wasn’t half bad. The acting was pretty good; although there was no one in the cast I recognized other than Primus bassist Les Claypool, who also did the music. The direction was more than adequate, and the script was solid if you buy into the basic concept. There are in-jokes about other movies in the dialogue, including a sly one concerning the under-rated movie Southern Comfort, if I’m reading the saucier comment right.

In the making-of feature, the director and writer talk about the movie being a metaphor for our desire to kill, the war in Iraq, religious extremism, etc., but I think you can ignore that. It’s a movie about people on the run from murderous rednecks, killer hippies, and a giant hog, and it should content itself with that. People who are squeamish about animals getting hurt and killed might have a few problems with it.

If the basic premise interests you, pop some popcorn, put your feet up, place your brain in “Idle” and put in this DVD. You could do worse than go on the Pig Hunt.
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Dark House

In time for Halloween, a group of new horror DVD releases have hit the stores under the banner of Fangoria Frightfest. They are all inexpensively priced, and somewhat indistinguishable outwardly in quality. I settled on Dark House as my first test subject, primarily because its cast included Jeffrey Combs (Reanimator) a genre veteran who is under-valued as an actor. I figured he’d be entertaining, at least.

Fourteen years earlier, a little girl accepts a dare from her friends to enter a spooky house where a crazy woman cares for foster children. Inside she finds a house filled with freshly murdered children, and the proprietor standing at the kitchen sink, grinding her hands away in the garbage disposal. The little girl, by the way, takes this all in rather calmly. I start getting nervous by the third butchered body I find, and I can’t stand to see someone mutilate themselves with a garbage disposal, but she takes it like a champ.

Flash forward to the movie’s present, and a now-adult girl is going to acting classes and seeing a shrink to deal with the memory of those events. The psychiatrist must have studied under Doctor Mengele, because he urges her to return to the scene of the murders to confront her fears. Oh, yeah, that’s great advice. Her opportunity to do so comes one day in acting class when Walston (Combs) shows up to hire the fledgling thespians. He makes a living off building spooky attractions, and his next project is to turn the Darrode House, where the killings occurred into Dark House (hence the title) into the greatest of his attractions. Given the lure of money, the students accept.

The group of acting students is one of the weaker parts of the movie, since they pretty much fit the stereotypes. There’s The Jock, The Slut, The Goth Chick, etc. despite the stereotypes, only a couple are annoying, so you don’t fall into the usual mode of rooting for everyone to die. They agree to play roles in the haunted house, not knowing one of their group has a history with it. Let me tell you, when the main actress is playing an actress who is supposed to be acting, you can tell she has the wrong major.

Dark House does look like the greatest haunted house ever. There are lifelike holograms that chase you down the hallways, elaborate sets, and anything else you could want in an attraction. I certainly wanted to buy a ticket. Of course, on the trial run-through, with a couple of reporters present (one from a fictional version of Fangoria, for those of you who like your stories meta), everything goes wrong. The holograms come to life, the fake traps turn deadly, and the group is diminished as they try to find a way to escape.

It doesn’t sound that great, does it? But surprisingly, I was pretty pleased with it. Combs is a delight as always, but the main thing is the makers of the movie didn’t take it overly seriously. There is a fair amount of humor, each of the characters have something to do other than die, and there are a number of in-joke references to other films (sample lines include “Be afraid. Very afraid.” and “Come with me if you want to live.”) I thought the frequent intercuts to warnings on the screens of the computers that controlled the house (FILE CORRUPTED, VIRUS ATTACK, etc.) to be useless and annoying since we know it is a supernatural threat, but nothing’s perfect.

If Dark House is a good representation of the series, I’m eager to see the others. If you’re looking for something new this Halloween, you could do worse than this one. It doesn’t set the world on fire, but it will give you an evening’s entertainment.