norman reedus film festival: red canyon

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2008. dir: Giovanni Rodriguez) A van full of partying college kids heads out into the desert, into Bofuck, Nowhere, where two of the kids, a brother and sister, have rights to an abandoned and dilapidated family home. After some ominous encounters with unfriendly locals, the law, a vicious dog, and decrepit tunnels, the kids have a nice picnic and go home.

Kidding! Actually, they get picked off, one by one, beheaded and impaled and eviscerated and such, during a night of extreme terror. And the town is not really called Bofuck, Nowhere, but Cainsville, which gives you a hint right off the bat about some pending revelations. Most twists of the "mystery" are pretty easy to guess, and, indeed, the "mystery" is not really the point, is it? The point is that we all get to watch some uppity kids suffer and die! Wahoo. Good times.

The story is that some years earlier the siblings had endured an ordeal in a nearby "partying" cave, an incident which the girl has never been able to remember clearly or to move beyond. Apparently the moral here is that sometimes opening old wounds doesn't so much lead to healing as, well, opening newer and possibly fatal wounds. It wasn't just the two kids affected, either, but the whole town. As the Reedus character puts it, "What happened in the cave that day fucked us all."

Reedus is Mac, the cold-bloodedest sociopath you'll ever see, and he brings him roaring to life with his usual panache and with total commitment. You remember in the Deuces Wild review when I said that if he'd played the character five years later, it'd have been better? This is what I meant. This character also has not one ounce of the good kind of humanity in him, he is the Utter Embodiment of Malevolence, same as that other guy, but in this one he storms onscreen full-bore, no quarter given, and you never doubt he's a full-bodied person. You can taste his sweat in your mouth as soon as he walks onscreen.

It was filmed in the badlands of Utah, so the scenery is strange and gorgeous. The Climactic Reveal flashbacks are edited so that you can't exactly tell what's happening, which kind of negates the point of a Climactic Reveal, if you ask me, and one of the characters speaks with so heavy an accent they subtitle him, which is distracting and a little odd. And, OK, whatever happened to the venerated slasher film tradition of the Final Girl's ultimate triumph? All of the men in this movie exist solely to kill or be killed, and the women exist solely to be raped and die. Does all this add up to a good time for somebody?

Rating: two and a (reluctant) half stars
Reedus Factor: three and a half stars