It was a rough weekend over at the Wolf den, folks, and I’m still recovering. I know what you’re thinking. You follow me on Twitter and saw that I was watching a shit ton of Fulci movies and you’re wondering how that could possibly be a bad thing. Well, to make up for how awesome Fulci movies are, I watched a couple of movies that a friend of mine had passed along with the warning that they were terrible. First up was the movie Black Goat, which arrived in a folded up piece of paper passing as a DVD case. The cover had some woods and the title was in a black metal font, so I thought it had some promise, but what followed was some sort of attempt at a surreal, Begotten-esque metaphorical story that looked like it was filmed by the characters from Trash Humpers. It made little to no sense and looked like garbage. I went to the next DVD, which was The Man Who Collected Food, which at least had a little more money spent on the DVD artwork, and ended up being a terrible horror “comedy” about a guy who resorted to cannibalism because he valued his collection of food more than humans. A higher production value than a Troma film took away the potential charm of it, and didn’t have the “so bad that it’s good” quality of something like Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat, so there was nothing redeemable I could find in there. With such shitty movies having been watched, I came across Frayed, a movie that I had at some point tracked down for one reason or another, thinking it could be better. Boy, was I wrong as shit. Yikes. To really let you know just how bad this movie is, I’m going to have to “spoil” the plot points, despite “spoil” makes it sounds like there was something good there to begin with. Either way, read on at your own caution.
If I knew the lyrics to any Slipknot songs, I’d be quoting it right here. All I can think of is stuff about getting down with the sickness and I know that’s not right.
As a little boy, Kurt inexplicably murders his mother and is sent to a mental institution. Years later, he breaks out and starts making his way back home. WAIT…LITTLE KID MURDERER GROWING UP IN AN ASYLUM AND BREAKING OUT TO FIND HIS FAMILY…THAT SOUNDS FAMILIAR…LIKE, OH, I DON’T KNOW, MAYBE ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS SLASHERS OF ALL TIME. Fuck, I hate this movie so much already. Kurt’s father is in the police department, so he tries tracking down Kurt while also making sure his daughter is safe. A security guard survived an attack from Kurt, so this security guard tries to help capture Kurt, seeing as he had direct contact with him. The movie jumps around from the security guard to Kurt’s father to Kurt’s sister, and you really have no fucking clue what’s going on or why anyone should care because it’s so fucking boring. There are a bunch of near kills of the security guard, but eventually Kurt’s sister, the security guard, and Kurt all end up in the same house together. When Kurt catches his sister, it’s revealed that the security guard was Kurt the whole time! He’s just so fucked in the head that he was the only one actually visualizing “Kurt”, and he was visualized as a clown masked member of Slipknot or something. Kurt hesitates killing his sister, which is when their dad steps in to kill him. When Kurt sees his dad, he has a flashback to seeing his dad wearing clown makeup on the day that his mom was murdered, and it was shown that Kurt’s dad was molested him, causing the psychological trauma, and it was also shown that Kurt’s dad was the one to actually murder the mom and made Kurt take the blame. PRETTY CRAZY, RIGHT?! Almost interesting even! That’s when Kurt is shown back in an institution looking at a photo of a softball team from 1974, and it turns out all the faces of these people are faces of characters we’ve seen throughout the movie. NOTHING WE’VE SEEN HAS HAPPENED OR MAKES ANY SENSE. There’s a voice-over explaining how damaged Kurt’s mind is and we’re supposed to be okay with accepting how 99% of the movie wasn’t real. What seems to have happened, in my opinion, was that Kurt broke out of the institution, but Kurt’s dad was the first one to get there, so he just shot Kurt, so everything we’ve seen in the movie happened between Kurt escaping and getting shot? WHO FUCKING CARES. THIS MOVIE WAS BULLSHIT.
I might’ve liked this sequence in the moments, but just looking at the picture draws a lot more Muppet similarities than I remembered.
FUCK YOU GUYS. GODDAMMIT. The opening sequence started out pretty cool, as it was just POV footage of Kurt’s mom walking into a room, camera pointing at her face, and her face gradually getting smashed. It was like a shittier version of that scene in Fight Club where Jared Leto’s face gets worse and worse, except possibly more graphic. Just a pretty cool makeup effect that looked pretty gruesome. Even though I had an idea that Kurt was actually the security guard, once I got to the end and there was the reveal that the dad had murdered the mom, I actually got angry with the movie because I had hated it so much and actually enjoyed that twist. Luckily, my anger subsided when they covered up that one interested twists with A THOUSAND OTHER FUCKING NONSENSICAL PLOT POINTS. Messing with the audience’s mind is a HUGE gamble when it comes to “it was all in a character’s head” kinds of twists. The reason that it can work in something like Session 9 or, in my opinion, High Tension, is because the twist of what the audience has been seeing doesn’t come until the end, and even if there might be discrepancies in how some of the events could have happened, you can suspend your disbelief because you enjoyed the journey to the reveal. The journey of Frayed was boring, poorly written, and poorly acted. Before knowing what the specific twists would be, it just felt like the sequence in Halloween where Dr. Loomis is trying to track down Michael Myers, except awful. Guys, fuck this movie. Because even when you thought it was good, it was bad. GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY FACE, TERRIBLE WEEKEND OF MOVIES. Well, except the Fulci movies, those were awesome.
Wolfman Moon Scale
The Wolfman Cometh 