THE REVEREND’S REVIEW
FT’s resident man of the cloth REVEREND PETER LAWS dons his dog collar and faces the flicks that Church forgot!
You’ve heard of feel-good movies, right? Let’s start with a feel-bad one. What Josiah Saw is a relentlessly depressing horror drama that will leave you emotionally soiled. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a warning. It’s an odd, interesting beast, split into four sections with each ‘chapter’ following the scattered members of a dysfunctional farming family, the Grahams.
We open at the farm itself, where patriarch Josiah lives with his mentally challenged adult son. Josiah’s wife is long dead, and the farm is supposedly haunted. Now Josiah is seeing frightening visions. He’s convinced the family must change its ways and ‘get right with God’. It’s a disturbing start, with a fleshcrawling performance from Robert Patrick as the deviant dad. Patrick is best known for playing the T-1000 cyborg in Terminator 2. He was a bit scary in that; here, he’s genuinely disturbing. Chapter Two is a complete gear change, where the eldest Graham brother, Eli, has a criminal encounter with a Gipsy gang. Chapter Three switches to a family drama, in which the only sister is struggling to have children. Throughout the film, we learn that a corporation is offering to buy the Grahams’ land – an offer that will bring them all back home for the energycranked final chapter.
The film is mostly slow moving, cold-hearted and uncomfortably dark. It doesn’t even feel like a horror movie for most of its running time, but if you can cope with the offbeat structure and bleak tone, you’ll probably find yourself quite affected by What Josiah Saw. I was, though I felt like showering afterwards.
Bonkers horror Glorious is way more fun. Miserable after a recent break up, Wes (Ryan Kwanten) drunkenly winds up in a public toilet at a remote rest stop. A voice from the next cubicle strikes up a conversation. Wes chats back and soon discovers two unexpected things. One, he cannot escape the toilets. Two, the softly spoken voice in the next cubicle is actually the Lovecraftian god Ghatanothoa, who has a favour to ask. This ever so quirky horror mines comedy, theology and gloopy gore. It really reminded me of Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage from 1988, in which a young man has similarly pleasant conversations with a repellent alien worm coiled around the base of his brain stem. If you’re okay with odd, give Glorious a go, not least for JKSimmons’s voicing of this toilet-based God.
Finally, we have Australian horror So Vam, in which a queer teenager and drag artist finds the power to stand up to homophobic bullies... after becoming a vampire. It’s got spirit, and has fun unpacking Bram Stoker’s vampire lore, but almost all the dialogue sounds like it’s been dubbed post filming. Still, I happen to find ropey production values endearing, and it’s good to see a monster movie celebrating what it means to be LBGT... but this is no Ginger Snaps.
All three films are streaming on Shudder this August.
This ever so quirky horror mines comedy, theology and gloopy gore