Former President Barack Obama once said, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” Despite criticism that he was mocking former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin who was John McCain’s running mate in 2008, it’s actually a version of an idiom coined in the 20th Century. A similar idiom is “You can’t polish a turd.”
In other words, both phrases mean that no matter what you do, you can’t change the nature of what something is. The fact that In A Violent Nature has received a Rotten Tomatoes score of 78 percent while most people online have panned it makes you wonder what the critics saw that the regular moviegoers didn’t. A movie based on a novelty or gimmick can only go so far if the story isn’t just stellar.
This movie marketed itself on being told from the point of view of the killer which could be a great idea if it was handled by the right filmmaker. In this case, the story is boring and basic even for a slasher movie. Johnny (Ry Barrett) is a hulking undead person who was wrongly murdered years before and he’s brought back from an unmarked grave when a group of friends out in the Canadian wilderness discover a locket at an old dilapidated fire tower. One of them, Troy (Liam Leone), took which led to his resurrection.
But it doesn’t matter who took it. The friends are so bland calling them one-dimensional is a complement. They all seem to be critical of everything and nagging in their discussions with each other. Normally, slashers would make victims so uncouth and obtuse that you couldn’t empathize with them when they got their throat cuts or eyes gouged out.
Only here we don’t even get to focus on them just for the typical half hour before the bloodshed happens. They all seem to pop up on scream just to be killed or they are seen from far away. There’s so many scenes of Johnny just walking through the woods that it lacks any true terror. Remember that criticism in Clerks II that the Lord of the Rings movies were just people walking? At least there was some action in between the walking. What made the original Halloween, Black Christmas and Friday the 13th so scary was the killers were lurking in the shadows and we didn’t know where.
What we end up having is just a movie where a person walks for about five minutes, then spends the next five minutes killing someone, then walking again for five minutes until he finds another person to kill. Chris Nash who wrote and directed the movie said he was inspired by Gus Van Sant’s Death Trilogy which most famously included the movie Elephant inspired by the Columbine High School. Massacre of 1999. Nash says he was also inspired by the works of Terrence Malick.
But the problem is Van Sant’s movies, especially Elephant, didn’t exploit violence the way Nash does. And Malick, despite his overrated reputation, still manages to tell a story that partially makes sense. This is just a movie about people being killed. The violence here is brutally vicious especially toward women. One of which is so disgusting I wouldn’t be surprised if Nash ends up having some skeletons in his closet. Then it tries to rationalize the violence at the end when an older woman in a car (Lauren Marie-Taylor) tries to say it’s typical to what foxes and coyotes often do to chickens.
Marie-Taylor famously appeared in Friday the 13th Part 2, but her performance belongs in a totally different movie. This might have worked had it been a Creepshow TV series episode or best as a V/H/S segment, but we already got that with the zombie Go-Pro segment in the second movie. All Nash has done is to present a horror subgenre in a different format that someone else will do a lot better at a later time.
The dialogue also contains what one of my writing professors Peter Christopher, may he rest in peace, called “soap-opera dialogue,” where a lot of character keep mentioning each other’s names so we’ll know who’s who. This is mostly because we just see the back of Johnny’s head as the voices are off-screen. But the problem is since the writer didn’t care about writing at least a mediocre movie, why should we?
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 