Cherry Tree Lane (2010)

Not NW10...

This is an English movie, even if one variation of the artwork clearly shows an American-style house and a white picket fence. It's actually set in North West London, and was written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams (another of his horror outings was darkly comic The Cottage).

That's... better...?

Cherry Tree Lane reminded me of both Funny Games and Eden Lake, and though it's neither as cerebral as the former nor as devastating as the latter, it still manages to be pretty riveting and successfully create tension with "only" a mostly one-room setting and a lot of dialogue. 

It never truly reaches heights of being scary (or at least, it didn't for me) but home invasion is always going to be unsettling... and here the invaders are not dramatic, masked, silent ghouls of unknown motive; they are loud kids with bad attitudes, little empathy, and when it comes to leader Rian (Jumayn Hunter, who actually starred in Eden Lake also) a real streak of cruelty.

The plot couldn't get much simpler; married couple Christine and Mike (Rachael Blake and Tom Butcher) settle down for an evening in - if I had one complaint, it was that the setting up of their dislike for one another was done so painstakingly, we were led to believe something would happen later to explain this, but it doesn't - and while they're eating dinner, a group of teens ring the doorbell and push their way into the house, taking the pair hostage. They say they want to speak to Sebastian, Christine and Mike's son. He's due home within the hour and they're going to wait. They assault Mike to subdue him and tie both up with gaffer tape.

What follows is a slow, stressful climb in unease as time passes, tempers fray and cruelties heighten. Much is done with off-screen violence, using the classic "we'll just have you hear what's happening and imagining far worse than we could ever show/afford to show" to great effect. Screaming and thumping reverberate through the house on a couple of occasions, and it makes up the nastier moments of the film as both the audience and other characters grimace and think about what's happening.

Even though this is a white middle-class couple up against working class kids, it never particularly feels like A Statement On Class. Honestly it feels more straightforward than that. It feels real in the sense that you can imagine Sebastian (whom we wait the entire runtime to see and barely catch a real glimpse of, a touch that I liked) is a mouthy little shit who acts like he's a big deal and got caught saying the wrong thing about the wrong person. I have known people like this - I think we all have. 

As nasty as Cherry Tree Lane gets, it never feels over the top. There are also some stand-out singular moments and shot compositions; watching one of the gang browse the DVD shelf in slow motion, tossing them aside, and the appearance of Christine in the foreground towards the end.

This one was a bit of a grower, but ultimately it left me feeling satisfied that I'd checked it out. I've been feeling pretty uninspired by horror movies of late... or locked into a perpetual scroll of streaming services through fear of wasting time on something shitty. There's so much shit out there! This piqued my interest - the clincher being it runs less than 90mins - and I'm glad it did. Oh, and anyone remember UNKLE? They did the music!

Cherry Tree Lane is currently streaming on Tubi! Honestly, Tubi is making me re-evaluate some life choices. It's free, their catalogue is MASSIVE and even if you have to wade through some crap, they have gems hidden in there too. 

I'd recommend giving this a spin if you want a short, sharp, English take on home invasion.*

*I feel I ought to say, however, CW: sexual assault. It's handled without exploitation, or lingering on the abuse like many movies tend to, but heads up that it happens here. 

Better Watch Out (2013)

I feel angry and gross after watching this. 

While Better Watch Out may scratch the seasonal itch of nasty home invasion for some, I don't ever see myself wanting to watch this again. 

Male director and male writer (check out this fucking charmer) bring us a toxic male lead you're gonna want to punch repeatedly in the face.

Streaming on Shudder now, if you want to put yourself through it.

Killing Ground (2016)

Killing Ground is an Australian Eden Lake, only with some timeline quirks, rape, baby violence, and a dog that actually survives (as far as we know).

To be honest I'm currently experiencing some fatigue from depictions of rape on screen. The moment I realised just how toxic the toxic males in this film were, it was downhill from there. Once that veil drops, that switch goes in their eyes (and credit to the actor Aaron Glenane for portraying this so well here) that's it, we know what comes next.

It's hard watching women sexually brutalised over and over, y'know? No matter how well it's done, no matter if the story sees the survivor exact revenge. It's still a narrative choice that depresses and drains. I wouldn't have knowingly chosen a "rape film" the night I watched this, and yet there I was, again, watching one.

So... I'm sorry, I'm tired. This is going to be a quick/lazy review. Here, have a look at some of the different artwork used for this movie...

I'll admit that first image was the one I saw and that's mostly why I gave this a chance. As these images suggest, Killing Ground is a nasty, competently-told tale of really awful shit happening on a camping trip. 

It's written and directed by Damien Power and it's streaming on Netflix now.

Deadgirl (2008).

Deadgirl is one of the few films that has made me check myself whilst watching. Asking what exactly I am doing viewing this stuff.

It's not even graphic, but it doesn't have to be. When the whole plot of a movie is centred around the repeated rape and abuse of a woman - okay, so it's a "monstrous" woman, a "zombie" woman - even I, whose discomfort threshold is pretty damn high, sits back and wonders what she is doing participating in this.

This is a horror movie but not in the conventional sense.

"She's just a dead girl, man. That's all"

Rickie and J.T. are two seventeen year old friends. They are the "weird kids", looked down upon or just plain ignored by all the other social groups in high school. One day while cutting class, they break into an abandoned hospital. After some wanton vandalism, they head down into the basement and find a girl, chained to a hospital trolley and apparently alive. They unzip her from the see-through body bag she is in.

"We could keep her...?"

I don't wish to make generalisations about the way seventeen year old boy's minds work, but this film pretty much spells it out: Sex. At any cost.

J.T. immediately sees this girl as something to give him sexual fulfillment and nothing else. She is something to fuck. Whenever anyone asks who the girl is or was, how she got there, what her story is... J.T. seems almost confused by the question. These are needless minutiae that he doesn't give a shit about. All he cares is that she is there and she is theirs.

Rickie runs, disgusted and terrified from the scene, only to be drawn back later by J.T. He stayed with the girl, raped her and when she started struggling he beat her to death. Only she didn't die. By the time Rickie returns his friend has done enough to her to have killed her three times over, has "heard her neck snap" and still she lays looking at them unaware that she shouldn't even be conscious let alone "alive".

Then unfolds the tale of deadgirl. The "unwilling but able" sex slave of a group of high school boys.

Things take an even more putrid turn when J.T. and Wheeler, another male let in on the secret, discuss how the girl is starting to smell and hint that the natural sexual orifices are becoming old news. Basically it comes down to "what other holes can we fuck her in?" and with that J.T. fingers an infected bullet wound in her belly.

"It's warm... and wet. This one is mine - there are two others just like it."

Wheeler laughs incredulously. Then he nods his head in compliance and says okay.

Sex with wounds is not news of course, we saw Crash. It's the nature of J.T. and the others, that's what made my skin crawl. What depths they will plummet to, in order to get their ends away. It's the reviewers catchline for the movie it seems, but the monster in this film is not the dead girl. It's J.T. and just about every male character we encounter.

When asked by a newcomer why the girl is tied up and looks to have been beaten, J.T. retorts:

"Because that's the way she likes it. Rough! S and M! Neither of you seen any pornos before? That's the way we give it to her. She's hot for it."

He says this dressed as a sick parody of Hugh Hefner, in underpants and dressing gown. We are given the impression he has moved permanently into the basement with her now. While he talks he strokes her arm as she is tied to the bed, barely conscious. Yeah, really hot for it.

After some trap-goading by the others, a jock is persuaded to let deadgirl give him a blowjob. Everyone but him sees where this is going... She bites it. His friend screams that they'll go to the cops. He is then presented with a dilemma: J.T., in the only instance in the film where the actual word "rape" is used, challenges them to explain to the police - and his girlfriend - how the injury came about when he was "raping a girl in the mouth". Their response is one of genuine shock and they try to defend their actions by stating that J.T. himself had told them the girl would "like it". Despite their horror - itself only manifested when the plans went wrong - they remain silent about the incident for the rest of the film.

A horrible scene to watch, made even more frightful by its juxtaposition with his fate, once the infection sets in. This is played for disgusting laughs:

Rickie, initially the most sympathetic character, is the only one given any fleshing out, if you pardon the pun. We see him at home, usually agonising over his situation or interacting with his mother's boyfriend. His mother herself never makes an appearance, tellingly. Whenever Rickie gets home and calls to she if she is in, she never is. This film has a largely male cast; with a small pool of girls as background cheerleaders and the like.

One of the more prevalent females is JoAnn, whom Rickie lusts after. She is an altogether more living female, but even his sexual daydreams of her culminate in the visage of deadgirl.

Thus entwining the two female leads: his real life object of affection and deadgirl, steadfastly together. After this dream is one of the many times he finds himself pulled back to the basement, presumably (he gets interrupted so we never see) to close his eyes and stick his dick in the living corpse, while imagining it's JoAnn. Fuuucked uuuup!

The one woman who is seen in the movie with successful strength is a would-be victim of J.T. and Wheeler. In another blackly comic sequence, she is belted over the head with a crowbar in the hope she will fall into their trunk to be abducted. Unfortunately for the boys, this woman is merely stunned and, as blood runs down her face, proceeds to beat the crap out of both of them on a petrol station forecourt, before robbing them and driving off. A peculiar addition to a film which was up until this point expressly about the ritual abuse and humiliation of another female.

But abuse issues aside for just a moment, I have to mention that there is some stunning cinematography in this movie. Mostly in establishing shots; the desolate small-town feeling is conveyed pretty much perfectly by something like this:

It reminded me of Brick in this way. Full of sky and yet somehow still almost unbearably oppressive. I'm not saying that it's okay for these kids to resort to awful acts because they view themselves as beyond help and hope, it just struck me that the film makers had an eye for this kind of mood-setting. J.T. states at one point "We have got nothing to lose", which pretty much hammers home that even at seventeen these boys figure they are a lost cause to society and therefore practically above the law - or more specifically not even on the law's radar.

Here's a quote that I happen to agree with. I found it on the official site in the press section. It is from Little White Lies magazine:

"The male characters each represent a different stage of the evil of men: they all in the end treat women the same, no matter how long it takes them to reach that stage."

This is how I viewed this film. Every man is just at a different level of depravity and poor - yes, poor! - deadgirl is the undead victim in it all.

Are we going to see more zombie rape films in the future? This is the second one in which I have seen it featured, believe it or not (the first being Zombie Diaries). It's a new direction for a genre in need of one, if a thoroughly disturbing idea. I considered Googling "zombie rape" to see if anything came up that I could mention here, but even I have standards I'm afraid.

Interestingly, I wasn't quite sure how I felt about Deadgirl immediately after watching it. However writing this review and forcing myself to think about it more than superficially, I have come around to seeing its value. I'm not sure I would want to own it, or see it again any time soon... But there's something about it that got to me and I think it has a valid place in the horror genre. The whole point of horror is to push boundaries, this film certainly does that and got me thinking about its very obvious issues in a way that a horror flick hasn't done in a good while.


Here's an article I found on "zombie feminism". Whether or not you agree with what is said is up to you, but I found it interesting!