Blu-ray Review – INBRED
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Positives
Negatives
Absolutely no one on Earth will benefit from having seen this film, it isn’t so bad that it’s good: it’s just terrible.
Stu is back with his review of INBRED, out this week on Blu-Ray in the UK
Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before: some cityfolk take a relaxing retreat in the countryside, only to find that the locals are bloodthirsty psychopaths. This plot has been done to the point that it might as well be its own subgenre. I like to refer to them as “wrong turn films” but you probably have your own name for them. By this point, pretty much every rural area has had one. The town I went to school in, Dingwall, even had its own last year with the surprisingly okay A Lonely Place To Die.
Inbred takes this unoriginal idea and applies to a group of young offenders from London and their social workers and ships them to rural Yorkshire, where the locals have cannibalistic tendencies, and put on League of Gentlemen-esque cabaret shows where people die in gruesome ways.
The idea is about as insensitive as it sounds – given that the victims are young offenders they are clearly going to be vulnerable people and most of them don’t look even close to being eighteen. Insensitivity really is the name of the game in Inbred, it’s rare that five minutes go without racist overtones, xenophobia or discrimination fun of the disabled.
It’s difficult to find any positives in Inbred, it is a film so bad that it left me speechless. The special effects are quite impressive, but with a film as poorly written as this one, they are wasted. The cinematography and editing is absolutely woeful. There are so many pointless extreme wide shots which make you think that maybe someone is coming from afar, but they aren’t. The actors who aren’t from Yorkshire tend to have terrible attempts at Yorkshire accents to the point where I thought some of them were supposed to be Scottish.
Inbred isn’t the worst film I’ve ever watched – that would be a film that I watched in 2005 called Love Object which was so bad that it kept me awake at night. Inbred is about a notch above that, which still leaves it as a hopeless, offensive mess.
Absolutely no one on Earth will benefit from having seen this film, it isn’t so bad that it’s good: it’s just terrible. I honestly felt dirty after I watched it. There are expertly written and well directed horror films out there like The Cabin in the Woods out there which are a much better investment of your time. You do not need to waste your time on this film.
Stu Anderson
Oh man, I’m so glad you reviewed this instead of me, Stu!
I second Rodney’s comment!! You da man!!
I take a martyr’s approach when reviewing films like Inbred. I watched this so no one else will ever have to!
And we applaud you for that. Having sat through Catwoman a few years back, I’m glad somebody else is willing to sit through the crud as well….
I think watching the odd stinker is part of being a good reviewer, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth! Inbred did sound like a film I would have been willing to take a chance on so thanks for sparing me the time Stu
Hi Stu and company:
Thanks so much for self immolating by jumping on this cinematic grenade.
Yea, tho. I say unto thee, that there are worse pieces of dreck to sit and cringe through.
I proffer to take the stomp down weird, back woods folksiness of Richard Sarafian’s ‘Lolly Madonna XXX’. Mix in the over blown violence of Charles B. Pierce’s ‘The Evictors’, Dave Durston’s ‘I Drink Your Blood’ and creepiness of George A. Romero’s original ‘The Crazies’.
And arrive somewhere in the vicinity of ‘Inbred’.
I actually watched the most complete version of I Drink Your Blood in existence at The Cameo’s All Night Horror Madness last weekend, and it was terrible, but terrible in the way that it’s still fun, much like a lot of the films I saw that night (especially Phantasm and Pieces). The problem with Inbred is that it’s not fun at all. I spent most of the film wishing that I could switch it off.
I bow to your wisdom, sir.
Good point!
Terrible and fun can work in a film. There is no way to fix terrible and terrible.
I caught ‘I Drink Your Blood’ at a Dusk to Dawn show at the Little Rock Drive In back in 1974. Along with an interesting split screen, psycho in a resort hotel titled ‘Wicked, Wicked’. With Scott Brady and Edd Byrnes. And a rather intriguing and memorable ‘Deranged’ with Roberts Blossom and Alan Ormsby’s surprisingly good take on Ed Gein.
Apparently different drive-ins in America cut different parts of I Drink Your Blood, so depending on where you saw it, it could be completely different! The version I saw was made up from various prints and was as complete as you will ever see. It looks terrible these days, but that’s part of the appeal! Thanks for your cool comments!