Starring Nicolas Cage, Selma Blair

Written and Directed by Brian Taylor

Something is sending the parents of a small American Town into a very specific homicidal rage…

Billed as a ‘black comedy-horror’, this Nicolas Cage/Selma Blair vehicle is a whole mass of contradictions and oddities. The basic plot is one not dissimilar to many horrors before it – a strange signal triggers something in the minds of any parent who is exposed to it, sending them into a frenzy that drives them to murder. There’s a very specific detail to this that makes it a little more unique than it otherwise might be, but that’s the main setup.

Brent (Cage) and Kendall (Blair) are, together with their two children, a fairly depressing look at the all-American family of the modern age. Brent goes to work at a job he hates, wistfully dreaming of younger, more carefree days and avoiding speaking to his wife whenever possible. Kendall is the former ‘rockstar’ of her field (though what that field was is never made clear) who gave it all up for motherhood and is starting to really resent that, now her daughter is a teenager who doesn’t want to be her best friend anymore and she’s stuck in a life she didn’t want. As far as the kids go, Carly is your fairly typical ‘seen it all’ bratty teenage girl, complete with stealing from her parents, doing drugs and sneaking to see her older boyfriend, and Josh is a slightly odd small boy whose oddity is made apparent through some flashbacks that don’t really add a lot to the story.

And that’s one of the main issues with the film – for all that the central performances are committed and decent, they’re attached to a vehicle that doesn’t really seem to know where it wants to go, and throws various scenes, flashbacks and ideas at the wall with no apparent coherence. There’s a recurrent flashback scene for Brent of his younger self in a scenario with a topless young woman that seems mainly to serve as an excuse to get a bit of nudity into the film. There’s the already mentioned flashback with Josh that gets even weirder when it gets a follow on some time later, and there’s a habit throughout at the peak of an action scene of suddenly flitting to another flashback that will last – in one case – over five minutes. It breaks the pacing constantly, and though some of the flashback scenes do add depth and colour to present events, it’s a clumsy implementation of the mechanic.

It’s also curious that in a movie with such a shocking central premise (adults killing children), the director seems inconsistently coy about showing much of the bloodshed in any real detail. There’s a scene late on in the film involving admittedly a slightly older child that’s extremely graphic, but at other times we are left with sound effects as the camera cuts away, followed by close ups of the bloodied weapon of choice afterward.

The use of the violence is particularly disturbing when its subjects are considered. There is a person of colour character who sustains substantially more injury than any other, and one of the more graphic scenes of murder involves the brutal strangulation of a young girl.

Combined with the repetitive use of the topless woman flashback shot, a peculiar gym scene and a teenage girl protagonist who spends the entire movie in a school uniform incorporating a short skirt which flies up at several opportunities, it’s not difficult to reach the conclusion that this is one that will be labelled ‘problematic’ by many groups of people, and that’s ignoring the central premise of children being murdered.

It’s an absurdity then. A small budget film with aspirations at being something so much sharper than it in fact manages to be. It plays out like a young teenager’s idea of ‘edgy’, and it makes so many bad choices along the way, both narratively and in terms of style, substance and pace, that it hobbles itself more effectively than anything else. My thought as the opening credits raced by in a blur of bad technicolour samples of the movie to come was that here was a director who was trying very hard to be Tarantino. By the end, it was clear that was exactly what he was shooting for, and I’m not sure who should be more insulted when I say that he absolutely achieved it in all the worst ways.

Verdict: Messy, incoherent and deeply problematic. In the light of the revelations around the industry in the last six months and the general pervading atmosphere, I’d be surprised if this even scores a cult following beyond the Nic Cage fan demographic. 2/10

Greg D. Smith