Inbred
Pedestrian
depravity
A mixed bag of
city-dwelling, young offenders and their two adult social workers venture onto
the wild, desolate moors of Yorkshire for a weekend of character-building
community service near the small, insular village of Mortlake. In Mortlake, the locals keep themselves
to themselves, quite literally; the gene pool is barely ankle deep.
But when two of
the urban teenagers have a run-in with some goat-torturing locals, events soon
escalate and before you can say “You ain’t from around here, are you boy?” the inbred villagers are rounding up the
outsiders and forcing them into playing starring roles in the village ‘show’ –
a perverse Grand Guignol spectacle where they are tortured to death in
horrifically cartoonish fashion for the delight of the filthy, braying crowd of
toothless, mutant, mouth-breathers.
It’s hard to
find the words to adequately describe writer/director Alex Chandon’s
horror/comedy Inbred.
Immature,
nasty, puerile shite are four pretty accurate and obvious ones though.
Yorkshire may
have given the world the Yorkshire Ripper and the Crossbow Killer but it also gave us the Brontës,
William Wilberforce, Ted Hughes and Alan Bennett,
not to mention old men going downhill in baths in Last Of The Summer Wine, though you wouldn’t know it watching Inbred.
A repugnant, low-budget wallow in the shallows of pedestrian depravity, Inbred is finally getting a release after
screening at the last two FrightFests and spending the year in between
appearing at cult horror and fantasy film festivals around the world. Something of a cult figure on the
horror circuit, Chandon’s last feature was 2001’s Cradle Of Fear, a tedious, childishly gory slog notable
for featuring a scene where Goth midget (gothget?) Dani Filth (lead singer of black metal band Cradle
Of Filth) rips the head
off FilmJuice
contributor Sean Mowle
(it’s in the first five minutes and he’s playing one of the oldest junkie
muggers in history if you’re interested).
In the decade
since, Chandon’s plied his trade directing music videos and creating digital
effects. And, judging by Inbred, obsessively watching every second of The
League Of Gentlemen to
such an extent that when the townies walk into the ‘hilariously’ named village
pub The Dirty Hole
(yup folks, that’s one of Inbred’s more sophisticated instances of comedy gold) you
expect the residents of Royston Vasey to be propping up the bar and for Tubbs
and Edward to warn the outsiders that it’s a local pub for local people. The leader of the villagers even
dresses like terrifying black-and-white minstrel Papa Lazarou! Unfortunately, Chandon’s film is
neither as funny nor as scary, lacking the intelligence and perverse dark
humour of the cult TV show.
Badly written,
badly directed and, for the most part, badly acted, Inbred features practically every cliché of the
inbred yokel sub-genre with the exception of hot, naked, high school chicks
skinny dipping. While most films
are significantly improved by the addition of hot, naked, high school chicks
skinny dipping, their absence here is something of a relief as Chandon would
probably have them flailing through sewage before being buggered to death with
a chainsaw. With its inbred,
racist, animal-torturing, porn-loving, murderous bumpkins, its misogynistic,
over-the-top violence and its faecal fascination, Inbred is trying far too hard to offend. It’s like someone else’s giggling
three-year-old daughter lifting her skirt to show off her new Dora The
Explorer knickers at a
party; you don’t need to see it, you don’t want to see it and it’s not
shocking. Though you could be
forgiven for thinking Chandon is something of a coprophiliac as excrement
features so heavily it should probably be on the cast list. Just above Emmerdale’s vet who features as a chainsaw-wielding
halfwit.
Nasty, vicious
and childish, one scene serves as a metaphor for the experience of watching Inbred.
One of the teenage chavs is caught by the villagers. He’s tied to a chair. He’s made to wear a wig (practically
all the women in the film meet nasty ends and the male teenagers who feature in
the village ‘show’ are feminised by being made to wear wigs and women’s
clothing. Make of that what you
will…). He’s presented to the
hooting audience. He then has a
hose shoved into his mouth and is pumped full of animal slurry until he
explodes, showering the cheering crowd with blood, guts and shit. Do ya get it? Do ya? You’re both the audience and the victim and Chandon wants you to
gargle his shit.
Cynical,
violent, unsubtle and unfunny, Inbred is the masturbatory fantasy of a teenage shit
fetishist.
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Jo Hartley, Seamus O'Neill,
James Doherty,
James Burrows,
Emily Booth, Dominic Brunt, Chris Waller
and Neil Leiper
Genre:
Horror
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 30
minutes
Certificate:
18
Rating:
1/5
UK
Release Date:
21st
of September 2012
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