Review first publshed S&S Nov 2012
Synopsis: The village of Mortlake, Yorkshire. Up from Milton Keynes for a character-building weekend, teen delinquents Tim, Sam, Dwight and Zeb and care workers Jeff and Kate fall foul of inbred, cannibalistic locals (led by publican Jim). After decapitating the injured Jeff, a now blacked-up Jim has Zeb and Dwight grotesquely murdered before a baying audience. Tim, Sam and Kate escape to their cottage, but are besieged by a posse. Maimed in a booby-trapped field, Kate is killed for sport. Tim sets a firetrap in the cottage’s cellar, but it fails and he too is killed. Fleeing, Sam steps on a mine, triggering it when a ferret runs up her trousers. Jim and his fellow villagers head back for a pint.
Review: Battered and bound, Dwight is wheeled out before a barnyard theatre of Yorkshire villagers who don protective 3D goggles and cheer with delight as sewage is pumped into the teen delinquent’s mouth – until his body explodes in a shower of shit. In all its low-brow grotesquerie, this scene encapsulates the essence of Alex Chandos’ Inbred. If the penile mask sported by Dwight’s tormentor evokes the similarly phallic headwear worn by Alex in A Clockwork Orange, this accurately reflects a film that is derivative to a fault, overtly cannibalising its community of murderous rustics from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Two Thousand Maniacs! and Deliverance. Viewers not quite sure whether to identify more with the young man tied to the chair or with his baying, boorish audience can rest assured that, either way, they will still end up covered in crap.
Inbred belongs to the pre-school of British horror comedy that has produced such mirthless monstrosities as Lesbian Vampire Killers and Evil Aliens. Absurdly exaggerating the South’s anxieties about the North and the city’s fear of the country, Chandos’ film resorts to the broadest of stereotypes: tooth-challenged, maggot-chewing yokels concealing ferrets down their trousers, and constantly singing a ditty whose refrain goes ‘ee-by-ee-by-gum’. Any remaining nuance is obliterated by bucketloads of bodily sauce, both red and brown.
Anton Bitel
One thought on “Inbred (2011)”