Berevement (2010)

Minersville, Pennsylvania, 1989; Martin Bristol, a young boy with Congenital Analgesia (a condition which prevents him feeling pain) is kidnapped from outside his home by psychotic maniac, Graham. For the next 5 years, Martin is forced to help Graham around the house, and watch as he tortures and kills women he kidnaps and brings back to the run-down meat packing plant he calls home.
In 1994, Following the death of her parents, Alison moves in with her overprotective Uncle and his family in Minersville. While out running, she becomes curious when she sees the now 11 year old Martin watching her from the derelict building.

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There's very little going on storywise in Bereavement... It's very much a "capture, kill, repeat" affair within the slaughterhouse, while elsewhere Alison forms a relationship with a young man she meets on one of her jogs, and her uncle disapproves.

During the torturing the women, Graham likes to cut Martin to freak them out, so there's a strong implication that the child was chosen because of his Analgesia. The killers other big quirk (besides the whole 'kidnap an murder' thing) is constantly arguing with, justifying himself to, or taking orders from, a wall mounted bull skull. He also babbles quasi-religious nonsense a lot of the time.

In fact, the movie's main problem isn't the repetition, or even lack of story, it's the lack of any kind logic. While it may be truer to life to have all of Graham's rants be disconnected, and his thought processes unfathomable (because; insane) but from a movie point of view, it would have been a lot more satisfying if he had some kind of consistent internal reasoning that we could follow.

Although the acting is for the most part excellent, that can't save it from the fact that on the story front it's pretty much a mess, which is what about half of the online reviews seem to think. The other half seem to think it's a masterpiece, up there with Psycho and Halloween. I can only imagine these reviewers were blinded by the excellent gore, and the fact that the movie genuinely does look stunning!

Speaking of the online reviews of this movie, it wasn't until after I'd finished watching and searched for information on the movie, that I found out something not mentioned on the DVD packaging; it turns out that Bereavement is a prequel to 2003's Malevolence (which I haven't seen) strain Martin Bristol as the killer. To be frank, this origin story should have been told in a half hours worth of flashbacks in that movie, because there isn't a feature's worth of story here.

A triumph of style over substance.

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Disclaimer:
If you look through the archives, you'll see that I've been using "Bought from Poundland" as a tag since at least 2011.

At the end of October 2013 I decided that all of my 2014 movies would be purchased from Poundland, and began buying up horror movies, to ensure I would have enough come October 2014.

In March 2014 I took a part time job at Poundland.

In accordance with the companies social media policy, in September 2014 I contacted Poundland's social media team to check that I would be okay to carry on with my plan to use the "bought from Poundland" tag.

I have been given the go-ahead on condition that I make the following clear:

All the reviews on this blog are entirely the opinion of Will Tingle, the reviews are not endorsed by Poundland in any way and (as should be obvious from some of the more scathing ones) are certainly not reviews I have been paid to write.

In short: The views expressed in this blog are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Poundland or it's owners, shareholders, or  management.