Jug Face (2013)
Thin air
15 May 2014
A weird thing here. At first dark, textured about hillbilly life, promising some novelty. The handpainted credits bespeak of more personal work, that this comes to us from people who wanted to be creative and not some Hollywood office.

A girl in a repressive backwoods village becomes pregnant just as her parents have arranged marriage and then a mysterious force in the woods (centered in a pit that the people venerate) that seemingly can divine these things, demands blood sacrifice in return for healing and grants visions.

All the tension and strangeness in us being called to parse these wrathful metaphysics through the eyes of people that genuinely believe in them and allow them to dictate life while independent of them having to juggle the possibility that it's all a backwards hallucination, possibly invented: that the imbecile potter merely sculpts faces from a stupor or thin air but does that make the hold of evil less real?

It's clear that they only had a small sketch of the idea as they set to work, interesting at first but goes nowhere, never deeper than something in the earth has to be appeased and the madness of being unable to fathom order; it's still more textured than all the Texas Chainsaw clones, more unusual, but it just smears around with the mythology it creates. A complete loss by the end. Sad.
27 out of 53 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

Recently Viewed