Monday, November 1, 2010

Back to the Blog with Eden Lake

2009
Director: James Watkins
Cast: Kelly Reilly, Michael Fassbender and Jack O'Connell
Plot: Refusing to let anything spoil their romatic weekend break, a young couple confront a gang of loutish youths with terrifyingly brutal consequences.

Well its been some time since we, your muchachos, have found time to discuss our latest movie viewings. I blame our watching of Gary Marshall's gorey love-fest Valentine's Day but that's debatable...

Luckily we recently viewed a movie so vile and upsetting that it begged for a blogging. For some time we had Eden Lake on our queue of movies to watch but somehow the timing never seemed right; I'd heard it was scary and disturbing but nothing to make it stand out. The plot of this UK movie seemed straightforward, couple goes camping, encounters some rowdy youth, things go unspeakably wrong. I think we may have originally picked it up since it has that adorable Michael Fassbender as the leading man. Eden Lake is scary, terribly dark, unrelenting and offers some unique perspectives on what appears to be a rather ordinary horror plot. There are obvious connections to the French film Them (Ils) where another couple is harrassed by teens, but unlike Them, Eden Lake gives motive and conscience to its dark teens. Sure they start out vicious and completely apathetic, but when things start going really badly, and their psychopathic ringleader indicates they'll have to kill the couple, most of the kids visibly squirm at the idea. When they are forced by their leader to take turns torturing poor Fassbender, equalizing the guilt of the situation throughout the group, you have one of the grossest horror movie scenes I've ever encountered. Not only are we scared as Fassbender faces his torture and the plans of the disturbed ringleader, but we are also scared for these kids doing it, one of whom is so upset he closes his eyes and clumsily thrusts a boxcutter into Fassbenders mouth. The end result was a movie that both scared the crap out of me, and also made me feel like I watched a really disturbing pyschological drama (Mean Creek came to mind since it also includes kids stumbling into homicidal situations). This gross-out feeling goes along with almost any of the newly genred "torture-porn" horror movies, but there is much in Eden Lake that Eli Roth's Hostel's could learn from. Its the idea of torturing someone that's disturbing, not showing gorey close-ups of the torture happening. And again its the dual point of view of the victims as well as the kids, who cringe and even cry as their bully orders them to finish what they started. I literally had to watch Arrested Development to get into a happier frame of mind after watching this movie, because if this plot didn't sound dark enough, wait until the ending!

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