So my wife watches this Joe-Bob’s Drive-In show that’s like a hosted horror movie thing, and whenever there’s one that’s kinda artsy, she saves it to watch with me, since “arthouse horror” is the main intersection of our movie tastes.

And so that’s what we have here. It’s an Australian film, by someone who very clearly wanted to be part of the Australian New Wave, and tbh is actually pretty talented. The camerawork throughout is great, with some very formally interesting shots (I guess this inspired some Quentin Tarantino stuff?); and the plot is one of those slow-burn tension things where stuff just kinda starts being slightly off and then ratchets up as it goes. It really feels like a Hitchcock-descendant sort of thing.

(As a kind of tangent, there’s one scene where sheets are drying on a line, and the heroine casually flicks off this enormous fucking spider, and I thought that was meant to be the horror escalating up drastically, but I think is maybe just that enormous fucking spiders are just all over everything in Australia?)

But so at the end of the movie, suddenly it ramps up into very conventional horror. It gets bloody and violent and screamy and what-not. I guess arguably it’s not completely unlike, say, Psycho, but it’s definitely a lot more genre than the rest of the movie. Joe-Bob’s cohost Darcy thought this is the part of the movie that redeemed the earlier too-slow part, but my reaction was basically the exact opposite: This is the part where all that interesting slightly-off tension turned into boring bloody violence.

But it doesn’t completely stop being interesting, and the last shot of the movie is great, and so I’ll give it a pass. I don’t think this one transcends its genre, but if you do like horror, worth seeing.

As an aside, I really like the Joe-Bob framing stuff. The dude is an old Texan, so exasperatingly old-Texan-white-guy a lot of the times, but a) cohost Darcy is younger and female and quick to roll her eyes at him, so it’s clear that his weird rants aren’t to be taken fully seriously; and b) when he’s actually staying on the topic of horror films, he’s super-knowledgeable, and it adds a lot to the experience having him give all the context about the background of the movie and the people in it. (Like, for instance, the story about how the last shot of the movie is actually a kind of accident, because they wanted to do something else, but it didn’t quite work technically, and so they ended up with a better shot by chance.)