Rating: 3/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2024 | 33/52 | Splatter Movie Guide
I go back there every night, without fail. And the events will happen all over again. I know it isn’t real, but the terror is real. It’s part of me now and I can’t escape it. Everything is as I remember it — the same jungle, the same paths, the same victims.
Frankie Dunlan lives in the gap between traumatic reenactment and repression. The sound of gunfire ricochets through an endless echo. What is beautiful is also dangerous — the line between innocent and perpetrator bleeds into one another.
Frankie’s crying child warps into inhuman synthetic warbles — its face, deformed from Frankie’s exposure to chemical weapons. His pregnant wife, Cathy, complains about the lack of food and the poverty of their daily lives. He can’t find a job — his lack of marketable skills makes it difficult.
His father raised him to care about himself and himself only. Frankie doesn’t believe in that. When he can’t find a way out, what choice does he have? Frankie cannot rectify that the country he fought for left him like a rat on the street. Something is wrong. How can he make it right?
When Frankie has flashbacks, the film flickers and speeds up — cuts and zooms briefly pull us into his internal reality. From a visual perspective, this movie is bleak and focused.
For whatever reason, however, the film injects constant narration and audio flashbacks, making literal what was already apparent by the circumstances.
The film can feel like Eraserhead, but with the surrealism stripped away. That may be because of the baby’s effects and its constant crying.
The score is pretty terrific — it reminds me of Angelo Badalamenti, but heavier on the synths.
The film is exploitative. Despite the subject and budget, it does its best to remain grounded. It left me feeling pretty down, which is the intent, and it pretty successfully captured the hopelessness that those in poverty feel.
In the right hands, this story could have felt closer to Taxi Driver or Christiane F. Instead, it pushes the gore and perversity to 11, undermining the groundwork that much of the movie did. Still, I believe this is not the failure some people claim to be.