Bereavement

You. It's What's for Dinner

Grade: C

Director: Stevan Mena

Starring: Alexandra Daddario, Michael Biehn, Spencer List, and Brett Rickaby

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 43 min.

If Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were to inbreed, their ghastly spawn would closely resemble Bereavement. No horror trope goes unexploited, from the emotionally scared youngster to the derelict slaughterhouse to the comely damsel in distress whose articles of clothing are inversely related to the buckets of Kensington Gore being sloshed about.

Writer-director Stevan Mena’s latest splatterfest is a prequel to his 2004 debut Malevolence, a former fave on the horror film festival circuit. Whereas Malevolence takes place ten years after the kidnapping of youngster-turned-psycho killer Martin Bristol, Bereavement backtracks five years in order to wallow in the CIP-sufferer’s grisly apprenticeship under his gonzo captor, Graham Sutter (Brett Rickaby).

For reasons that are never explained, Sutter has also been abducting and butchering young women in and around the sleepy borough of Minersville, Pa. for years without arousing any suspicions. Indeed, when 17-year-old Allison (Alexandra Daddario) moves to town following the death of her parents to live with her uncle Jonathan and aunt Karen, they make nary a mention of the dwindling maiden population before Allison takes up jogging alone down secondary highways. Indeed, Uncle Jon (Michael Biehn) seems more distracted by Allison’s flirtations with William, a motorcycle-riding rube, than the fact that she might end up on the back of a milk carton.

Unfortunately for Allison, stupidity proves genetic. When she trots past Sutter’s Meat & Poultry Plant one day and spies a young boy standing in a broken window, she doesn’t call the police, child protective services, Uncle Jon, or Batman. Instead, the horror gods dictate that she venture in alone, setting off a chain reaction of climactic carnage.

Despite Mena’s stated desire to develop an emotional connection with the characters, they are essentially cardboard cutouts existing purely to fill predefined functions. For most of its two-hour running time (Mena’s original cut was reportedly over three hours) the narrative oscillates back and forth between Allison and her travails with tepid teen angst, and Sutter and his interminable, hollow rants directed to his late father’s apparition and a mounted longhorn steer skull (you read that right).

Bereavement pays off with an audacious finale that sates the audience’s bloodlust, even though it’s capped by the worst crime scene investigation this side of The Usual Suspects. Mena’s knowledge and dedication to the horror genre is earnest, but how much value is there in being a poor man’s Eli Roth?

Neil Morris

Originally published at http://goo.gl/cJdtI