The Return of Fright Film Spectacular

This blog was going to be a regular thing. And then it wasn't. There were a lot of reasons. Brain surgery. Divorce. Drug addiction (not mine). The list goes on, but for awhile I had no interest in blogging about horror movies.

But now, here we are in the scariest month, and it's time for some frightening films. I'll try to watch as many as I can to continue the Fright Film Spectacular tradition, but I'm not promising anything. Life is still in the way, as the saying goes.

Now, formalities out of the way, we start October with a movie I discovered on Netflix streaming: Jug Face.

Jug Face is about backwoods weirdos and their god, which lives at the bottom of a muddy pit. As long as the rednecks feed "The Pit" with a little human sacrifice occasionally, the pit will heal them when they're sick. That's the pact they made since they "survived the pox," as one character says.

Who gets given to The Pit is revealed by The Potter, played by Sean Bridges, who you may know better as Johnny from Deadwood. When The Potter makes a clay jug with your face on it, you get given to the pit. That's how it works in backwoods blood sacrifice land.

But some folks don't want to be given to The Pit, including our heroine, Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter), who happens to be pregnant with (drum roll to introduce cliched Southern stereotype) ...
her brother's baby! And, of course, mayhem ensues when Ada finds a jug with her face on it and hides it so the backwoods gods don't get their preferred victim.

The film also stars Sean Young, who played another redneck mama in Poor White Trash, which is a hysterical comedy. Young is less loving Southern mom and more sadistic matriarch in this flick though.

The movie is weird and disturbing. It has a high yuck factor (which I guess is good if you're into that sort of thing), and the gore effects are good, thanks to Robert Kurtzman, who has done effects on everything from Army of Darkness to Pulp Fiction to Texas Chainsaw 3D. It's not for the squeamish. Torture, miscarriage, dismemberment -- it's all there for the gorehounds.

It gets minor points off for being the 3,450th movie to perpetuate Southern stereotypes like inbreeding and possum eatin', and it gets major points off for one of my biggest pet peeves -- uneven sound. I can not stand having to turn it way up to hear dialogue and then way down to keep from waking the neighbors during intense scenes.  How this is still a problem with all the technology that exists in the 21st century is beyond me.

All in all, I wasn't mad that I watched the movie, but I wasn't necessarily all that happy either. Jug Face is strange, but it's nothing special.

2.5 out of 5 stars.