User Reviews

Good stuff first: It does well within the confines of a very low budget. It is shot through with a sense of humour so jet black and disturbingly bizarre that it comes close to transcending belief. The gushing blood, splattering gore and exploding viscera is extremely well rendered with occasional bargain basement CGI that is minimally intrusive. Sometimes it's like a series of brief and punchy acid flashbacks to Tod Browning's infamous 1932 pre-censor horror antique FREAKS. This is not a bad thing.

Not so good stuff: Horror movies used to be morality plays. For the most part, evil people and phenomena wreaked havoc and were then defeated by the forces of good. Sure, innocent people died in the process, but in the end the beast was vanquished or the armies of Satan defeated or whatever. In the best horror movies, the sources of evil or bad were humanised and believable - Hitchcock's PSYCHO being a prime example. Norman Bates evokes conflicting emotions of sympathy and revulsion in the audience. Sometimes in horror movies the bad guys won, but not very often.

Things gradually changed with movies like THE Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE, HALLOWEEN and Friday THE 13TH. There were still surviving victims in some of those films, but this gradually became less and less common. The agents of evil also changed, so monstrous, inhuman and inhumane, that they no longer generated understanding or sympathy from the audience, rather they became cardboard machines with minimal function - to butcher and terrorise. No more, no less. At first this was different, new. Then films where no one survived the carnage became the norm. And now what was once different is the same and by default crashingly predictable and all rather boring.

In the seventies, INBRED would be something new. In the here and now, it's another also-ran among thousands. The victim characters are unsympathetic non-entities and no one cares if they live or die. Just as well, because it's clear from the outset and the tone of the film that none of them are going to make it. When characters do very little that equates comprehensible logical and contextual responses throughout to avoid their fate, that makes it a bit obvious where they're headed.

The redneck freaks are just as one-dimensional. Ugly, evil, vile, inhuman, yet largely characterless, they invoke revulsion but no other connection. Their leader, Jim, is clearly the glue which holds them together. If you had a shotgun trained on him and one of his minions and you were given the option, which one would you shoot? No prizes for guessing which in this type of film where normal human logic is an alien concept.

Yes, I know, behaviour in horror movies is often arbitrarily illogical to advance the plot. The character who wanders off alone, the people who go into the old dark house when they just know there's something evil in there. But there has to be at least some tenuous link with reasonable behavioural norms in order for an audience to suspend disbelief.

INBRED plays like a checklist wherein all the irrational and stupid options open to the running ducks are the ones that get a tick. The most ludicrous one being the character who is pinned to the floor with steel croquet hoops over his wrists. The clearance between the hoops and his wrists is so vast he could have freed himself at any time. But he just continues to lie there whilst he is tortured to death. This level of glaring stupidity can almost have you shouting at the screen: 'Just move your bloody hands ya moron!'

So here's the deal when figuring out whether or not to watch INBRED. It's a horror film with no real scares but plenty of blood and guts. All the characters you should be rooting for you won't care about and you'll figure they're all going to buy it anyway from the outset. And you'll be right about that. The villains of the piece will prevail, and you'll have figured that also. Some will get wasted, but not enough to make any difference to the pre-supposed and heavily signposted outcome. The motives of the inbred freaks and their genesis/history is never explored. They do what they do for fun and food because they are simply retarded, stupid and unpleasant and lack any moral insight.

I was faintly bored by it for the most part, but impressed by the black humour and some of the gore effects and what was achieved overall on a shoestring budget. If it wasn't for those elements, it would have been lucky to scrape a score of 2.

This was another Horror Channel late night feature. Horror Channel can be a bit hit and miss, but occasionally you get a few nice, low budget British horror ('Stalled' is a good example of a super low budget Brit horror that they've shown and was a pleasant surprise).

I started out quite happy, as it had legendary UK Scream Queen Emily Booth in the opening scenes. Sadly, this was just a brief cameo.

It's your standard issue cannibal-hillbilly-gang-hunts-kills-and eats-dumb-kids gorefest, just set in Yorkshire rather than the woods of West Virginia, and it's crap.

If you've ever seen League of Gentlemen, you'll immediately see this is a rip off of the villagers of Royston Vasey (they even use the 'you can never leave' line and blatant use of Papa Lazarou's black face and outfit).

They used a fair bit of expensive CGI together with old school effects and the deaths by horse and muck spreader were quite creative, but the kids and social workers in peril were irritating and so you don't really care if they live or die. If you want a semi decent British horror about young offenders in peril, go watch 'Wilderness' instead. It's not perfect, but it's 'Casablanca' compared to this.

You might dig it if you're absolutely wasted on home brewed vodka, just make sure it's not just watered down pee.

Even 'Wrong Turn 6' was better than this, and that was abysmal.

No, Inbred is not a documentary about the Royal Family; it's the first film in ten years by British director Alex Chandon (Cradle Of Fear). Inbred was the penultimate film to be premiered at this year's Frightfest in London, and it's a film that seems to have divided those who have seen it as brutally as its victims bodies are divided on the screen. On the one hand, there are those who are already dismissing Chandon's rural-set gorefest as distasteful garbage, on the other there are those who were instantly won over by its dark humour and its unrelenting intensity. I'm proud to say that I fall into the latter category.

Inbred follows a simple premise. A small group of young offenders arrive in the sleepy Yorkshire village of Mortlake, for a community service weekend. The group includes a bespectacled arsonist, a cute shy girl, a weedy gang member, and an archetypal lad. They're led by two youth workers, the feisty Kate (Jo Hartley), and the endearingly dorky Jeff (James Doherty). On their first night in the countryside, the visitors make the mistake of popping into the local boozer, the imaginatively named The Dirty Hole, a pub which makes The Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf In London look positively normal in comparison. It's there that they're introduced to Jim (Seamus O'Neill), the pub landlord, a man who's nearly as comical as he is sinister. The following day, while the group are stripping abandoned trains, they find themselves in a confrontation with Jim's son, which quickly and dangerously escalates. Soon the locals have turned against them, and from then on the group's quest for self-improvement turns into a quest for self-preservation as they desperately fight for their survival.

Inbred begins with a trusty old film within a film opening, one that features cult British horror chick Emily Booth in a cameo. It's not a particularly clever scene, but it's one that perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the film, droll humour coupled with extreme brutality, courtesy of the film's consistently impressive gore effects. At the beginning of the film, as the group of outsiders arrive in Mortlake and we get to know them, the film is mostly light-hearted in tone but with a palpable uneasiness simmering underneath. The first genuinely creepy moment is the haunting sequence that was featured in the film's trailer - a gang of kids prodding a bloody human scarecrow with sticks.

As the visitors begin to interact with the locals, the film ups its humour, milking plenty of laughs from the gormless, backward villagers, one highlight being the discovery of a unique pornography collection. But roughly half an hour into the film, when the first drop of blood is spilt, the rug of comfort that the humour provides is pulled out from under our feet, and we're quickly plunged into a bizarre nightmare that rarely lets up until the final credits.

It's clear to see that Inbred is heavily influenced by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and although it's not quite the sledgehammer to the senses that Tobe Hooper's masterpiece is, it does manage to successfully channel that film's hopeless sense of dread, allowing us to fully experience the desperation of the characters as they struggle to find a way out of their harrowing predicament.

The characters themselves are brought to life by an impressive array of performances, many of which are by newcomers to the big screen. Nadine Rose Mulkerrin is excellent as Sam, the only girl in the group; her baby-faced innocence a perfect contrast to the evil they encounter. All of the young actors are impressive, but if I had to single out one more it would probably be Terry Haywood who plays Zeb, mainly because when it's his turn to meet his maker, his hysterical begging is uncomfortably realistic. As for the adults, the always dependable Jo Hartley turns in what is perhaps the film's strongest performance as the tough as hell mother of the group Kate. And real-life Yorkshireman Seamus O' Neill who plays Jim, the ringleader of the killers, creates a villain who manages to amuse and terrify simultaneously.

It's the tone of many of the performances that is undeniably one of the film's strongest points. Usually, when a film is as outrageously violent as Inbred, the performances of the actors playing the victims, and their characters, are jokey and tongue in cheek, making us care less when they're gruesomely dispatched with. In this film however, the victims are all played completely straight, as straight as the performances in films like Eden Lake, which makes the experience of watching the film much more disturbing.

Most of the film's flaws come from the bad decisions that some of the characters make, a common complaint levelled at even the best of Horror films. Why not use that as a weapon? Why not floor it while you've got the chance? These questions popped into my mind a few times while watching the film, but not nearly enough to ruin my enjoyment of what was otherwise a gripping and powerful little shocker.

Inbred is guilty of all the criticisms that have been thrown its way. It's mean-spirited, it's nasty, it's offensive, but I must've missed the meeting where it was decided that these were bad qualities for a Horror film to possess. I enjoy subtle, slow-burners as much as the next Horror fan, but I also like to be brain-raped occasionally, and Inbred did that like a mad dog on heat. Pork scratchings will never taste the same.

One of the sickest films i have ever seen.Absolute gratuitous violence gore and sadism.This is not entertainment in any form should be banned and if you think its funny , either A)you are intellectually deficient or B)lacking any moral spirit. I shudder to see how anyone could enjoy this film , Terrible, is this an indication what people will peddle to make money ,very sad in the true sense of the word. After watching this film i find it hard to see how it could ever have been given a certificate to be shown in cinemas or even worse be allowed to be seen on TV. Why is it these days that anything goes ,is there no moral code anymore or has that been ditched for the chase to make money at any cost or thought for the consequences.

Weirdly, I want a sequel.

This is clearly a ridiculous budget indie film where the guy making it has a few connections because there's a couple reasonably well known British actors in it.

While the acting and the script leaves a lot to be desired but the gore and the story is actually executed (pun intended) well, there's a clear beginning middle and end which you don't always get with films like this and you even start to root for a few of the characters particularly the last two, but we all want love to win don't we? For the sake of the story I did want one to survive. Shame really.

Anyway my sequel idea. These are all teenagers and while they may be delinquents I'm presuming they have parents. I'd like a sequel where it turns out all these kids parents are hardened gangsters, coppers, soldiers and special forces and they all descend on this sleepy Yet 100% accurately displayed Yorkshire village and take revenge on the community of brother husbands and sister wives in a similarly gruesome fashion, and this time.... ITS PERSONAL.

If you enjoy: a) brilliant, convincing acting; b) careful character development; c) well-constructed plots; d) innovative cinematography; e) artfully-crafted scripting; f) top entertainment value; g) memorable shock scenes; h) nail-biting suspense; i) creative use of props and scenery... then stay away from this flick: it delivers NONE of the above. I watched the whole thing. Very early on, I knew it was rubbish, but dared myself to stick with it to the bitter end... and it was indeed bitter. Hard to appreciate how the film earned an overall score above 5, but them's the facts, ma'am. Standards had to be set very low by the viewers, or they were watching while in a very "happy" mood.

I saw this film as part of the Imagine film festival (SF/fantasy/horror) Amsterdam 2012. The synopsis on the festival website suggested that we could expect a lot of blood, splatter, chainsaw handling, etcetera. Those who love that, will have plenty of it, plus some very creative variants thereof. But there is much more to it in this film.

The first unusual aspect is the composition of the group that chooses a remote village as their temporary location. We witness the arrival of two coaches and an assorted mix of former delinquents, all planning to have a didactic weekend together. They expect to be alone with themselves in the countryside, undisturbed by others, just being busy with teamwork assignments and physical labor. Secondly, from the very beginning we observe worlds of difference between the two coaches in how they handle situations. And thirdly (last but not least), the delinquents themselves are very unequal in their backgrounds and the severity of crimes that brought them there in the first place. This micro cosmos in itself suffices as ample building blocks for an assortment of plots.

And then there are the villagers. The title of this film says it all: we can expect some inhabitants to be (what we euphemistically call) mentally challenged, or at least showing abnormal behavior in the broadest sense of the word. They may be harmless against people they know, or those knowing how to handle them. But you can expect the unexpected when meeting strangers. We see, for example, that a completely natural action to order food and beverages in the one and only local pub, leads to very unusual reactions from the locals. And the country cottage they had planned to serve as a base station for their weekend activities, is less than comfortably furnished too. Nevertheless, we see a promising start when they together clean up their temporary home, trying to make the best of it.

Given the above list of ingredients, one can expect almost everything regarding further developments. Suffice to say here (no details, to prevent spoilers) that a happy ending seems farther and farther away with each hour of their stay in that village. Coaches and delinquents have already enough on their plate to make the weekend a success. And spurious confrontations with the villagers don't help to achieve that, rather the contrary.

Not unusual in this kind of film is that a considerable number of the locals dies. What I did not expect, however, is that all our "good guys" die in the process too, one even more miserably than the other. That neither the coaches nor the delinquents survives it all, may give rise to a bit of disappointment. It leaves us no one with whom to celebrate some sort of a happy ending. The finale is thus devoid of any chance for us to get emotionally involved with at least one of them, someone who we all had hopes for to eventually leave the premises unharmed and live happily ever after.

A few notes from the final Q&A: This film took 26 days for the shooting. They had Strawdogs in their mind all along as an example to follow in its footsteps. The budget was "ridiculously" low (the amount was not revealed to us, however).

All in all, I was not disappointed in the net result. Nice ingredients, but the resulting flavors are not in balance, due to some scenes being a bit over the top in gore-ness (is that a word?). On the other hand, given the IMDb synopsis "a blood-soaked, deliriously warped nightmare", no one can reasonably complain. Most viewers will find themselves somewhere in between. I see this confirmed in already existing IMDb reviews, mostly controversial, varying from very bad to very good.