BETROTHED (2016)

Betrothed (2016)
Directed by: Jim Lane
Written by: Jeff Rosenberg
Starring: Bill Oberst Jr., Bunny Gibson, Mikayla Gibson

Coming soon to VOD from Red Cardinal Films

Like so many other low budget horror stories Betrothed doesn’t have a lot of subtlety. This is the case when it comes to both the plot or the sources of inspiration which the writers have drawn from. Unfortunately beyond the intriguing title this is just yet another riff on the standard backwoods killer idea. It comes complete with kidnap, torture and a collection of sleazy creeps who are, one way or another, trying to keep it in the family. Their dysfunctional antics are hardly endearing and neither are the abilities of the film-makers involved. I’d like to say this is more than the sum of its parts or give you a sense that it’s not a film to be judged by the cover. But like some of the characters involved it’s just a dumb source of misery.

Audra (Mikayla Gibson) is the latest victim to have a run in with this gruesome ensemble. After giving her mother a lot of bad attitude and complaining about various first world problems she heads out to the store. Looking for groceries she’s unlucky enough to run into the two brothers of the family involved. They’re on the lookout for another kind of item… a new ‘wife’ to join their happy home. Their own disapproving mother has sent them on this errand after their first attempt to find a partner for younger sibling Adam (Jamie B. Cline) went awry. Before you can say does this rag smells like chloroform Audra finds herself in chains, trapped in what appears to be a desert house in middle of nowhere with nothing to do but wait for her new fiancé to plan the big event.

It’s a film that gets its intentions out of the way pretty quickly. This is particularly true in the first act when a girl on the roadside is taken away in the back of a van and meets a nasty end within a few minutes. There are some juicy moments of blood and gore for those looking to be sated by horror effects. But unfortunately they’re ‘enhanced’ with some of the worst CGI that I’ve ever seen in a film like this. It’s sort of mind boggling what the intentions were. Since the practical stuff works well moments like this are very much out of place. To make things more confusing this film has been sat in limbo period after it was made in 2014. At the time of writing it took several years to find a distributor, so you’d have thought someone might have made a few changes.

However it’s still in the this state, warts and all. Generally speaking this is a feature which includes many strange elements from the bad camera work to the bizarre stock sound effects that have been used to mark scene transitions. All they had to do was make a violent slasher film, and apparently nobody involved was aiming any higher. But just focusing on what actually works here seems to have been a problem. For a dumb genre picture there’s a lot of extraneous material crammed in here. The reasons of course are not exactly creative and after a while it becomes clear that padding is the name of the game.

As you might expect from a direct to video style effort there’s a lot of random vagaries so it can reach that golden ninety minutes. Instead of a series of well paced thrills what you get is a lot of elongated scenes that really draw things out. There are several subplots including an out of town detective looking for the missing girl, as well as her mother trying to get answers. It’s just an excuse get a lot of tedious dialogue in at every opportunity. In between almost every scene at the creepy house there’s plenty of melodrama and inane chit chat. Things go on far longer than is necessary, and by the end it begins to grate when they even string out the finale. This is a film which includes a family of religious loonies who want sex slaves, isn’t there any enjoyably depraved madness at all?

While a silly metal track does play over the opening it never shows up again. This lack of personality is apparent everywhere from the bland soap opera lighting to the bland soap opera acting. It’s badly in need of some atmosphere and some really odd characters. It borrows heavily from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but nobody has picked up on the sinister vibes given off from its cast or location. Here the clan mother Ginnie (Bunny Gibson) is the only ray of light in the whole thing, ranting about The Bible and hitting people for using foul language. In one instance she has one poor girl cutting a cake while another is brutally killed. There are other family members involved but most of them are far too dry. When things get nasty it’s never really insane enough when so many insane people are involved.

Any sense of twisted levity is absent while at the same time there’s nothing truly disturbing on offer. For a title like Betrothed I would have expected something a little more creative than straightforward kidnap and suffering. Something that really plays with the idea of marriage would have been a lot better. They could have pushed the cracked Christian ideals a lot further and really gone to town with elements that play up themes of engagement and matrimony – as well as the old family values. But then this kind of imagination would improved the whole thing. Instead it’s just a missed opportunity, hinting at what could have been before becoming a slog by veering off the path into the desert.

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