Movie Review: The Woman (2011)

Hey, bloggers! It's February again and in the horror world, that means it is Women in Horror Month! How apropos is it that the post I had scheduled to run today would actually fit into this? Freaky!

It's been a heck of a long wait for this one, bloggers! I had totally forgotten about The Woman until I saw it at the video store the other day (yeah, a video store! They still have those!). The Jack Ketchum book of the same name that this movie is based off of is a true masterpiece in horror, as it is one of the most horrific tales I have ever read - in a good and a bad way, if that is possible. Ketchum is known for his balls-out horror yarns that pull no punches, and this adaptation is no exception. (Psst, you can read my review of the book here.)

As established in the previous film Offspring (which by the way is an okay little horror flick despite its bad actors and low budget - I also reviewed that movie here - am I a shameless self-promoter or what?!) and the books, the titular character The Woman is the last of a clan of feral cannibals who once savaged the woods and caves where they lived. When lawyer Chris Cleek, a.k.a. The Worst Father/Husband/Man in the History of the World, stumbles upon The Woman while out hunting, he decides to capture her and keep her locked in his cellar in an attempt to teach her how to act more civilized. His brow-beaten wife and daughter and his douchebag son are brought along for the ride. 

The Woman is an interesting little concoction because the book and the screenplay were written simultaneously by author Jack Ketchum and director Lucky McKee. This is probably the reason why the book and film follow each other so closely, except for the fact that the movie sets a much different tone than the book. Ketchum's The Woman was a very dark, gory, and disturbing look not just into what Chris does to The Woman but into the dynamics of this intensely screwed up family. Though The Woman herself no doubt has a gross, cannibalistic, and brutal nature, that doesn't even seem to compare to the atrocities committed by Chris Cleek alone. His power over the people around him is so severe that you find yourself hating every character at one point or another because they can't take down this one little man.

Lucky McKee's film, as aforementioned, has a slightly different tone, and one that I was not too happy about at first. In all these scenes that were supposed to be nasty and dirty, there was this banging, upbeat soundtrack behind it that too often took away from the seriousness and utter horror of the situation (well, except the end, which ROCKED). When Chris first sees The Woman bathing in the creek, the music started up again and gave the scene that feeling like, "Holy shit! This is great! I'm watching a naked chick take a bath!" instead of what the scene was really about - Chris zeroing in on his prey, another woman he can possibly brutalize and control. I understand that the soundtrack was used to lighten the mood of a movie that would otherwise be so freaking depressing you would want to kill yourself after watching it, and for some scenes the soundtrack was used really well (loved the song playing when Peg is on the field at school), but to me this shouldn't be a "light" story at all.

The mood and tone of the film is also set by Sean Bridgers, who gives an exceptionally eerie portrayal of Chris. The way he plays this man who is so completely evil and callous makes the audience angry and upset. After punching his wife in the gut, he can casually tell his daughter (whom he's been raping) to go get a cloth for her, as if she just had a little headache or something. Bridgers's performance is probably best described as one that is actually quite funny - but the most uncomfortable funny you've ever experienced. You can laugh or chuckle at the calm and almost likable way he delivers his lines - if what he was talking about wasn't so damn awful! I was very impressed by this man's performance and the commitment he gave to a role that nobody in their right mind would ever want to play.

And I'll be damned if Pollyana McIntosh (what a name, eh?) doesn't deliver with every fiber of her being in her portrayal of The Woman. She gave a standout performance in the same role in Offspring, especially in one of those last moments where she starts eating a guy's brains out of his head, so it's great that the filmmakers had the foresight to keep her character around and center another story around The Woman. One thing I wish Lucky and crew would have done was to include subtitles for The Woman's strange made-up language. I mean, mostly you get the gist of what she's saying from her expression and gestures but especially in the part where she asks Peg for help from her father, calling her "Mother" because she is somehow able to sense that Peg is pregnant, I think it would have helped to have the subtitles to show early on the connection formed between Peg and The Woman.

There is a smidge of Ketchum's famous gore throughout the movie but you have to make it to the ending for the really good stuff. Chris has finally gone too far when he kills Peg's teacher by feeding her to the dogs, and Peg finally sets The Woman free from the cellar to have her fun. Oh, it's glorious. Face-biting, body-throwing, body-hacking, heart-ripping, and heart-eating - all the bad guys in the movie finally get their comeuppance and it is bloody fantastic, if you'll pardon the pun. The gore effects are really well done here and as in Offspring, the filmmakers leave nothing to the imagination and show the audience these kills with all the blood and intestines and organs in their arsenal.

I think The Woman is looked at as a "love it or hate it" movie (or an "understand it or don't understand it" movie) and it may not be for everyone (especially this guy) but I'm one of the ones that loved it. It is probably the best adaptation of Ketchum's work so far, and though the handling of the material at some parts is not to my liking, the performances, editing, and effects more than make up for it.

P.S. Jack Ketchum rules!

Book Review: The Woman by Jack Ketchum

I thought Jack Ketchum had gone just about as far as he could go with books like Off Season and The Girl Next Door. Turns out that there are new levels of evil and grotesqueness that I never realized - or maybe I just didn't want to. The Woman is one of the most disturbing things I've read simply for the amount of sin and hellish acts depicted by just about every character.

Many spoilers ahead.

In The Woman, the last survivor of the feral cannibal clan from Off Season and Offspring - aptly given the name "the Woman" - is captured by hunter Chris Cleek. He restrains her in his fruit cellar in an attempt to tame her, with the help of his wife and children.

When first reading the synopses for this book, I thought that the character of the man who captures the Woman would be a normal guy who was really actually trying to help her to stop being a feral cannibal killer. This most certainly turns out not to be the case.

Cleek is in fact the most amoral, evil, and misogynistic person I've ever had the displeasure of reading about (I can't wait to see how angry I get at him when I see the movie). Like I said there are spoilers here, and I just have to put down all the horrible things this man represents and what he does. Let's see... he captures the Woman; chains her in his fruit cellar; introduces her to his family as some sort of trophy; abuses the Woman; rapes the Woman; beats his wife (in front of his children); keeps his 10-year-old disabled daughter chained in the barn with the dogs, letting her become a feral flesh-eater not unlike the Woman herself; has been raping his daughter Peg for several years and has gotten her pregnant; and murders Peg's lesbian teacher by literally feeding her to the dogs. I've left out some little things, but that is the bulk of his evil deeds. On top of all this, he is teaching and encouraging his son to be just like him - and the son happily obliges.

So how could anyone not get angered and/or offended by what they read in The Woman? Is Ketchum simply out to shock his readers with the most vile things he can think of? To a point... maybe he is. It's what has gotten him noticed and sells books, but, and I know I don't the man personally, he doesn't seem like that kind of guy to me. I like books and movies who take things to the extreme, I like people who have the balls to show us the ugly side of things, and not just because they can but because sometimes really profound things can actually be learned. Ketchum proved that with the complexity of The Girl Next Door - another book that on the surface is simply full of cruel acts of torture with no moral compass. But TGND brings up many important moral and societal issues, as does The Woman - so why does it matter what means Ketchum uses to convey these points?

The problem with The Woman, and most of Ketchum's other novels, is that it was too short. I read this book on a lazy Sunday afternoon in only a few hours. And this is a shame for a book with such power - or at least the potential for a powerful message. Many will think that the focus is only on the gore and the continual degradation of the women in the book, but in a strange way, this is can be seen as a story of female empowerment.

Okay, wait, hear me out. This is a common thing with Ketchum's works. He often hides the most poignant messages and insights into society underneath the most brutal stories and unlikable characters. The Woman gives us the epitome of the worst man in the world put up against this physically strong and powerful woman who doesn't really give a shit what he does to her because those things don't matter to her. She's a survivor and a fighter and Cleek is no match for her, despite what his male ego tells him. In the end, all of the women untainted by his evil mindset come out the winners and go on to survive and thrive, living the way they want to.

Fans of Ketchum and gorehounds alike will probably enjoy The Woman for its nastiness, but I'm not ready to dismiss it just yet as nothing but sleaze. Looking deeper, I see something more to it and I hope others do, too.

I'm still a bit confused about the inclusion of the last section of the book entitled "Cow." It is essentially an epilogue, but quite a long one, and though it reveals what I thought the end of the book meant for Peg and the Woman's future, it's an odd way to present it. It's told from the point of view of the women's male captive, and if you've read Off Season and Offspring, you know what it means when this guy is known as a "cow" to the women. Not saying I didn't like it, just that it was different.

Movie Review: Offspring (2009)

So after seeing the video of the guy freaking out at the screening of "The Woman" at Sundance and his six-minute tirade against it at some Sundance dude after getting kicked out, I REALLY WANT TO SEE "THE WOMAN." But that movie seems to have fallen into the strange, gaseous ether of movies that people hated at Sundance, and searching for a nationwide release date for it turns up bupkiss. Instead I turn my attention back to Offspring, the 2009 film version of Jack Ketchum's second novel about feral cannibal people living in the caves of Maine. I say I'm going back to it because I tried to watch it online once many months ago and it pooped out on me halfway through.

The sequel starts off with a grisly murder of three people by the children of the cannibal clan, which sets the local police and one harried ex-cop whose dealt with their damage before off on a mission to find the family and stop them for good. Meanwhile, David and Amy Halbard (a young couple with an infant daughter) and their houseguests Claire and young Luke must fight against the bloodthirsty killers, while also dealing with Claire's psycho soon-to-be ex-husband.

Of the movie-izations of Ketchum's novels that I've seen so far - Red, The Girl Next Door, The Lost, and Offspring - I honestly haven't been that impressed, with the exception of The Girl Next Door. But even that one, though it had great actors in the main roles, fell a little flat in some respects. I just feel like Ketchum's work has not gotten the treatment it deserves by movie standards. Is his work too disturbing? Gore is all over the place in movies nowadays but the underlying subject matter is perhaps what people can't handle about him.

The unrelenting gore and depravity is what makes this series of books famous and we can perhaps be thankful in that regard that Offspring wasn't optioned for a big budget film version. The filmmakers go all out in most of the scenes - dead babies, bloody torsos, beheading and brain-eating, a girl pulling a guy's intestines out of his stomach with her teeth - it's all here. These cannibals really enjoying killing their prey in the most gruesome ways, depicted to us in all the bloody glory the filmmakers can muster.

I'm a little - but not totally - put off by the look of the cannibals. With their crazy afro hair and dress that makes them look like aboriginal headhunters or something, it's a bit too on the nose. Why don't they just wear the clothes of the people they kill? How do they even know how to make their fur bikinis and crop tops? Also they speak in their own cave-people language which is funny, but if they were the descendants of lighthouse people or whatever, wouldn't they have known English and passed it on to the rest of the clan? Just sayin'.

As much as the original novel was pretty much short and to the point - cannibals, blood, gross torture, cannibals die - so then is this movie. We only get the bare minimum of backstory and characterization for David, Amy, Claire, and everybody else before all the crazy shit starts. Ketchum's other novels more character-driven, but this one and Off Season before it are definitely more situation-driven. It doesn't really matter who the victims are because the story is sort of not really about them. Sorry, but it's not. It's about the blood.

The acting choices are interesting. Not a single recognizable face and in fact, if you click on some of their names on IMDb, Offspring is their only credit. That tells you something right there. The portrayals are mediocre, not terrible and not great. The people playing the cannibals are the best thing about the movie (besides the part where Stephen's gets his head half cut off and the main chick starts munching on his brain) is how these guys go all out and really get their cannibal freak on.

See it if you love Jack Ketchum but even then, don't be expecting the greatest depiction of his classic stories of cannibals.

Sidenote: Jack Ketchum is an awesome guy. If you go to his website (www.jackketchum.net) and check out the message board, you can leave a message for Jack himself and, wait for it, HE'LL REPLY BACK TO YOU. I wrote him something about how much I liked The Girl Next Door and he wrote a nice little appreciative message back. Very cool, Jack, very cool indeed. And watch for his cameo in this movie as the EMS guy Max at the first crime scene in the beginning.

Jack Ketchum - the horror author that Stephen King loves

Enough about movies, let's talk about books. I have recently discovered an amazing, if not somewhat neurotic, horror author by the name of Jack Ketchum (a pseudonym - his real name is Dallas Mayr, which doesn't sound as horror-y). He is successful in his genre but not so crazy famous that he's completely inaccessible to fans. He has an official website where you can leave comments or questions for him, and get this - he actually responds to them. Within a couple of days. It's amazing. I told him how one of his novels seriously affected me and he actually took the time to show his appreciation for my comments. How cool is that?

Anyway, maybe you're wondering why I say he's somewhat neurotic. I call him that because most authors have a style of writing or general theme in their writing that transcends all their books. Pick any three Jack Ketchum novels to read, and you would swear that they were all written by different people. There is some element of the horrific in them all, sometimes though, it is not what most would consider horror.

Ketchum first made an impression on readers with his very first published novel, Off Season. In this gruesome novel, a group of friends staying at a coastal house in Maine are attacked by a feral family living in the caves on the coast and feeding on human flesh. Reminiscent of The Hills Have Eyes, both stories are based on the legend of the Sawney Bean family (an interesting read - check out the story here).

Off Season can be described as a gore-fest. It's a fairly quick read, but there is so much blood and guts and incestuous cave-people sex packed into this tiny novel that it is not something you'll forget soon. We even get a recipe on how to cook human flesh. Nice. But it's totally awesome. Gorehounds like me love this shit - if it makes you do that dramatic thing of putting her hand to your mouth in shock, then I'd say the story is a success. Well done, Jack. (There's also an equally disgusting sequel to Off Season that is worth a read, Offspring.)

Okay, so we have a gore-fest like Off Season, and then the next Ketchum book I read is Old Flames. Whuh? This is by the same guy? Old Flames is this incredibly simple story of a woman meeting up with an "old flame" (oooh, clever title, eh?) and she either still loves the guy or is just a wacko because she becomes friends with his wife just to kill her. It's not that Old Flames is badly written or a bore or anything, it's just so weird that this is the same guy that wrote a scene in Off Season where the cannibal girl stabs her brother in the ass, then takes the blood from the wound, rubs it on his penis and then has sex with him. So I don't know if this difference in the general theme of the writing is really neurotic as I said earlier, or some kind of proof of a mad genius.

Also, in the copy of Old Flames that I read there was another novella in there called Right to Life. Holy crap. Just look at the picture over there. This was about a couple who kidnap a pregnant woman on her way to an abortion clinic. They want the baby so they decide to hold her hostage in their basement until she gives birth - there's some sadomasochistic torture and other fun stuff here, but again, it's another example of this writer seemingly not knowing in what genre he wants to be. It's good that he's got such range, but you probably wouldn't think much of this author until you read The Girl Next Door.

It is one of my new favorite novels. You wanna talk real horror? This novel GOES THERE. I mean, it goes to places that are so dark they can't possibly be something that could ever really happen. But The Girl Next Door is based on a crime that occurred in the 60s in Indianapolis. I'm eerily obsessed with this story - the true crime, the book, and the movies - and have much too much to say about them. Will leave for the next blog.

Another Ketchum novel I recommend is probably The Lost. Great story with some unforgettable characters. Ray Pye is this nihilistic, egotistic, evil person who shoots two girls he sees in the woods because he thinks they are lesbians. He drags his two "friends" into the act as well, and manages to not get caught for the attack, even though one local cop is sure that he committed the crime. The novel is a rather slow burn as the reader gets to know Ray and the other characters around him. The big question throughout the novel though is, Where is this going? How is it going to end? Is Ray just going to get caught? Will there be a big shoot-out or something? These characters have gotten themselves into some serious stuff and with Ketchum, you're not really sure what to expect.

Everyone seems to love Red as well, but it didn't really affect me as much as it did others. Perhaps I have no heart. I'm very curious about several other Ketchum novels, but I find he's a little hard to come by at chain bookstores. Go for Amazon.com or a used bookstore to find some of his more obscure novels.