Little Deaths wants to shock you. It wants to brutalize you the way you may have been brutalized by the films of Lars Von Trier or Takashi Miike. It fails at this.
Little Deaths is a portmanteau horror film, and if you know
me you know that I love a good portmanteau horror. Creepshow; Tales From the
Crypt; The House that Dripped Blood; Tales From the Dark Side The Movie;
Southbound, these are my bread and butter.
There’s nothing better than settling in with the cinematic equivalent of
a short story collection.
Little Deaths is comprised of three stories by three different
writer-directors. None of them are worth
the price of admission.
House and Home, written and directed by Sean Hogan starts
things out. It features an upperclass
married couple who prey on a homeless woman.
They lure her with the promise of a good meal and a few dollars only to
drug and rape her. The film gives us a protracted scene of her sexual assault
that feels like it is meant to brutalize the audience. The director wants this
to be shocking and hard to watch, but it’s just so gratuitous and stupid that we
feel mostly insulted. To really drive home just how gritty and grim and dark
this tale is we are forced to watch a
man urinate oh the face of his rape victim.
It’s just grimy, grotty and cheap. Watching this I felt nothing approaching
an emotion other than annoyance (if annoyance can count as an emotion).
It’s hard not to compare this to movies that treat this sort
of subject matter with intelligence, and depth.
The big twist in this tale is that the homeless woman and
all of her friends are ghouls of some sort and that they eat the couple. I realize that I didn’t warn you about spoilers,
but frankly if you couldn’t see this “twist” coming then you aren’t likely to
be reading this anyway.
The middle story is Mutant Tool and it’s written and
directed by Andrew Parkinson. In it a
woman tales an experimental drug synthesized from the semen of a mutant man who
is being tortured. It has something to do with Nazi scientists or something. It
never really makes any sense and I honestly had trouble focusing. I suppose it’s
supposed to have a sort of Human Centipede vibe, but really it fails on every
level.
The final story, Bitch, is written and directed by Simon Rumly.
In it a bartender is in an abusive relationship and gets revenge by feeding his
girlfriend to dogs. That’s supposed to be a clever twist you see. We have been
treated to scenes of the boyfriend on a leash, being pegged while wearing a dog
mask. Again, it’s supposed to be shocking but really, it isn’t. It isn’t even
interesting. The biggest problem is that the “vicious” dogs all look incredibly
cute and friendly and it is impossible to believe that they would kill and eat
this woman.
Horror movies, good horror movies, can terrorize. They can
unsettle. They can horrify. The amateurish
urge to shock, or gross out undercuts all of those. When the creator lacks subtlety and skill,
they can fall back on the naked attempt to spark revulsion and revulsion is
only interesting when it is in service to something else. This film has nothing
to say, and spends much too long saying it.
I honestly want to write and direct my own horror film now.
I know that no matter how badly I fail in execution, at least I will not have
made Little Deaths.
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