Yes, Yorkshire is really as good as everyone says it is. I’ve been living here for close to a decade now, and it’s simply wonderful. I’ve never had to deal with hairy pork scratching’s or being called a ‘soft Southern shite’ (not directly, anyway) and I’ve certainly never encountered someone yelling ‘Ee by gum’ (and apologies to anyone American reading this, but you have no idea what any of this means). Come to think of it, I’ve never actually had run ins with suspicious, mutant-shaped locals either. But, at least from within the world of Inbred not all poses are so fortunate, which is meant to mark the return of Alex Chandon, writer and director after his 10 year hiatus. This is rather different fare as well, especially since his last movie was Cradle of Fear: which was centered around Dani Filth. With Inbred, he stepped away from Gothic stylings altogether and shifted towards a combination of backwoods splatter and horror comedy.
The story here is straightforward, whether viewed as a gore film or a horror comedy. A group of young offenders and their support workers are traveling from the Southern England to the dreadfully known ‘outside London’ region. They are actually ‘going coop north’ to Mortlake, an ex-coal mining area, for a weekend of team building activities. This place also includes strange activities such as stripping metals from old trains and other bizarre things such as building bridges from toilet rolls. Zeb, a master lockpick, Tim the arsonist, shy but pretty girl Sam, and the gangbanger/chief jerk Dwight are some of the characters accompanying on the trip. From my perspective, understanding these characters does not make motivating these children seem like an option available to me and as expected, it is not a choice I am willing to make. But they do leave us with a strange opening sequence: a gory film in a gory film. But if the boys are just watching Emily Booth come on screen, then what is the point of it? Regardless, none of this structural stupidity really matters after this.
You can practically predict the tropes at this point: mobile phones are locked away (given that this is horror film, there usually wouldn’t be a signal anyway), the group goes to the local pub, the locals are creepy, you won’t want to try the bar snacks and then the fun really begins. Mortlake has an audience that needs to be entertained.
Chandon seems to understand very well that he’s not reinventing the wheel, and so he hurls his cast into a multitude of gory deaths with glee. For example, inbred contains some imaginatively nasty and grisly sequences that horehound’s will like, even though they may kvetch about the ratio of CGI to more hands-on splatter being a bit too much. I know, it’s an obvious genre film fan moan, but it does effect investment in a lot of key scenes, as much as you can appreciate the thought behind it. Speaking of investment, there are some clichés we can all do without like the ‘small town people are dangerous ingrates’ which is so frequently used to tell the story and what you make of this depend on your tolerance.
People get furious whenever I have seen them talk about it, and for the record, I didn’t, but in case you visit this place, it is advisable to check at the entrance your zeal for originality as well as your zeal for anger because you will have a much more enjoyable experience here if you do.
The animal heads superimposed on the women’s faces in a pornographic magazine was a masterpiece that would make me laugh. With such pleasure derived from the single scene in the magazine, I was not surprised to enjoy the climax of the movie which, as a spoiler, was a cherry on top of the Yorkshire stereotype. Do bear in mind that I had my share of grudges against the movie: the transitioning from comedy to suspense was executed in a clumsy manner. The film did not resolve itself as a comedy due to the excessively brutal nature of the film and, surprisingly, it did not play well into the horror genre too. This can be attested to the moment of the magazine being featured, that had all of the animal heads glued into it, amongst other things. It seems as if there is too much ambition on the director’s side, on which prevents the movie from what it actually intended to resolve to.
Similarities can be drawn between this film and the British horror comedy series ‘The League of Gentlemen‘. For instance, the use of blackface during a circus kind of show like the skeleton we see mounted in the room, but I am sure out there in the dark woods of super-monsters, there are a lot more. While combining humor with horror, The League of Gentlemen was over the top, but pulled it off exceptionally well. It was done with a masterful level of understatement. The gore is taken up a notch in this, which changes everything. And perhaps the simplest answer is that horror comedy is more complicated than it looks.
Inbred gets a lot of things right: I was impressed with Ollie Downey as the director of photography, and the long shots of the Yorkshire countryside are, to be fair, fucking stunning (and so are the shots of the locations that were used). The performances in the film, while becoming excessively shouty at several points, were on the whole good and Jo Hartley as care worker Kate was wonderful, very engaging and working wonders with her role. Considering you’re probably not expected to like the kids all that much, they are convincing and if you think that troubled teenagers don’t speak and act like that actually they do (and care worker Jeff’s earnest spiel about teamwork and so on is well-realized too.)
So, fine, Inbred is not a perfect film, and aside from the novel methods of dispatch, you have probably seen most of what it does somewhere else. That is understood. But there is still skill and charm in the mix too and when I say “charm” I mean a kind of gleefully mean-spirited humor that I have not seen done quite like that before.
I do not wish to say it, but I enjoyed my co-writers’ remarks, though some were quite savage. With that said, I was entertained by some of the people I recognized in it. And nothing beats the glee of seeing your friend prancing around in a pig’s head mask on screen. I tell you, Yorkshire folk and their nepotism.
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