The Butcher Brothers

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) Look, I get it alright: As a writer myself, it’s fun to cross genre boundaries, to mix very different elements, and to blend things that have never been blended before. But that self-indulgence often comes with a price when it’s done badly, and you can point to The Violent Kind as an example of what happens when you can’t temper subgenre hopping with craft of execution or even basic likability. As a horror film, The Violent Kind initially seems to be a biker movie, albeit one where a weekend jaunt to an isolated cabin results in a few characters being possessed by hedonism and murder. So far so good—well, for some values of “good”—in that we’re in familiar territory. The film and its characters aren’t likable in the slightest, but there is at least some tonal unity at work. But forget that, because the second half of the film goes into much weirder territory as time-travelling 1950s greasers capture and torture the surviving characters (calling them protagonists would be a stretch) as the film slides into an apocalyptic conclusion. By the end of it, what have we just watched? Maybe four subgenres jumbled together. Maybe nonsense. It’s hard to tell. Although not being able to tell suggests that “nonsense” is on the right track. But as philosophers say—you may not remember the details but you will remember how they made you feel, and The Violent Kind does not leave a positive impression. It’s not just a mess but an obnoxious, pointless mess. Writers/directors “The Butcher Brothers” (ooh, edgy) were able to churn out a few movies between 2006 and 2014 and good for them—but working with viewers didn’t seem to be high on their list of priorities.