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Weird you should mention that, as I just watched it yesterday. I'm not usually given to such extreme reactions about a film, but it was pretty unwatchable (and I say this as a horror movie aficionado, or someone who thought he was one). The relentless sadism made it less a film and more an endurance marathon of torture porn, which seemed to serve no other purpose than to revile. Thing about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the film is utterly beautiful, aesthetically speaking - this had no such redeeming features.
In other horror movie news, House of the Devil is great, as much for luxuriating in the 16-mm induced sense of the late 70s/early 80s as for the horror part of the film. Anyone who loves Hallowe'en will be smitten, I'd expect.
I don't think one can really make any kind of justifiable distinction between intrinsically valuable horror movies that have some kind of "redeeming features" and entirely worthless and merely voyeuristic torture porn - to make this distinction has become some kind of self-delusion of an ostensibly high-minded audience to define certain areas of on-screen deviancy that one might be legitimately fascinated by without having to feel like a pervert against other types of movies that are cheap, exploitative and just generally questionable in their intention and execution. Of course, in actuality, it's absolutely impossible to draw a clear line here. While movies of the latter kind most often really are cynical exercises in sadism tailer-made for a mostly male group of consumers, some of them, like Mum & Dad, push the genre to the very limit and, by revolting him, confront the viewer with the question what it is about horror movies that makes him enjoy them in the first place. The film in question, while - as I'm unashamed to admit - also entertaining me, made me question my own fascination with horror movies so profoundly that I've begun to wonder about the exact nature and purpose of the affect manipulation machine that is cinema in general.
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