Intensity:🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 It doesn’t get much rougher than this
Directed by Hans Stjernsward
The Farm is a hillbilly cannibal horror tale, and that should give you some clues about how this goes down. This is hard to watch.
Here’s a movie that belongs in the hillbilly horror/road trip horror canon. And that might be both a good and a bad thing. Like many films of this sub-genre, this will be a tough watch for most audiences. It is even a little rough for hardened horror fans. If you’ve read our Bridge Too Far post, I would put this movie as a 20. It is a tried and true trope. The young couple taking a road trip must find a place to rest. The couple stops at a diner, and they eat some mystery meat burgers. More on that later. They get directions to travel up the back road a few miles for some cabins for rent. DOOM.
The acting of our two leads, Nora Yessayan (Nora) and Alec Gaylord (Alec) is solid, as our sympathetic will-be victims. Their pre-horror banter comes off naturally, but they stumble into the most time-honored trap tropes… the crazy in-bred housekeeper. Double down on the fact that the cabins they check into are old scout camp cabins. Just say no to nasty cabins! The couple fails to notice the blood-stained mattress. Surely they must have smelled awful. The couple had gas. All they needed to do was switch drivers rather than stay in a skeevy, off-the-beaten-path beater motel. So many warning signs. They ignored all of them.
A big guy hiding under the bed abducts the couple while they sleep. (Genuinely creepy reveal) They wake up caged in the middle of a farming commune, trapped with several fellow gullible travelers. The men are cattle stock, and the women are the dairy stock. Ewwww. OK, up to this point, the premise holds strong. The disappointing thing is that the film struggles to figure out its voice in the second act. The cultists all (mostly all) wear plastic animal masks at all times. This makes little sense, particularly knowing how hard it is to see or breathe behind those things. Why wear a mask if everyone around you is a like-minded cultist? It would make just doing day-to-day tasks even more of a chore.
These cultists have to be supernaturally perceptive to spot sneaking escapees while behind cattle masks… you’ve worn a plastic Halloween mask… you can’t see squat from behind those masks! On an aside, a hockey mask is designed to allow for good vision, as goalies must see a puck coming their way, so Jason’s mask makes sense. The animal referential flip is also too on-the-nose for my taste. The animals turn on the humans. Unnecessary for the most part. Also, the cultists say nothing except the in-bred innkeeper and one of his dim-witted henchmen. So, I have issues with the villains in this movie.
The movie has some gruesome shock scenes; some are critical to the story, but it has others that seem largely unnecessary. These scenes don’t advance the plot or add any depth to the characters to indicate how nasty the villains are. Without a context for why the farm is what it is or how the odd innkeeper duped them, it fails to connect other than to gross you out. They try to escape many times. Many attempts are foiled. I think the film would also have benefitted by truncating the second and third acts to a more streamlined escape plan. The ending is a classic nihilistic, brutal one, but with an attempt to try an overtly artistic homage. I think it felt tacked on after what we had just witnessed.
The live audience reception was tepid, and I felt bad for Stjernsward, who was in attendance, as most of the audience fled immediately after credits rolled. If this would have been a focus group screening, they would have sent the director back in for edits. If your test screening audience is a horror fan base, and they all flee your movie afterward, that’s a bad sign. This movie had strong influences from Motel Hell, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Hostel. The movie’s sadistic edge gets muddled, however, by the goofy villains and it dilutes the power of the savagery a little. Rather than stick to a straight torture porn film, like Hostel, or a horror satire, like Motel Hell, it splits the difference and ends up less weighty as a consequence.
It’s not a film without merits, as there is some authentically scary stuff, and the gore effects are BRUTAL. It does succeed in my rule #1, which is that you have to care for the protagonists. In the end, it was undone a bit by the oddly constructed escape sequence, and you don’t get to see how the escape plans unfold. I would have just headed for the hills. Also, how many “the car won’t start” tropes are you allowed in one film? For those with a stomach for intense gore, you might do well with this film, as a mixed-bag response from me might be completely different for you.
If you see this film, though, you probably won’t forget it anytime soon! (For better or worse) The Farm is not rated, I guess it would be in the running for an NC-17, if it did. The Farm is having a limited theatrical release on November 16, and is available streaming on Vudu, FandangoNow, and Amazon Prime.