EPTThe Bare Bones
John is an author who moves to a rural house in South Carolina with his son Sam and daughter Louisa. The daughter hates it there. Right from the first night, there’s a bunch of weird noises everywhere and there’s a Smeagol on the roof. There’s a large mound that Louisa obsesses with but John and Sam don’t want to go near. Tons of Smeagols are in the woods, they kill things. Louisa gets increasingly creepy until she’s eventually downright evil. John has to kill her, does.
The Title
Unfortunately the movies isn’t about Sam coming out and saying he’s a girl on the inside. But that did give me an idea for a dope new movie: A teenager lives with his great-grandfather Clint Eastwood and comes out as transgendered. Then the movie is 90 minutes of actual footage with people trying to explain to Eastwood what that means without getting shot at.
Anyway, this isn’t that. Rather, it refers to the daughter getting possessed (or alien-raped, it’s never entirely clear) and becoming unidentifiably different. It’s not as good as my idea but the movie’s not awful.
Definitions
I make up words to explain things to myself when taking my rough notes, it’s probably best to explain wtf I’m talking about.
Smeagol [noun] - The little monster things in the forests that commit the shenanigans are very clearly Smeagol from Lord of the Rings, so I’ll refer to them as such.
Smeagol [verb] - Smeagoling refers the hissing and shuffling of feet/leaves we hear whenever anything bad is about to happen. It also refers to the weird dubstep noises apparently emanating from the Smeagols for some reason.
Mound - Exactly what it usually is, but it’s such an important plot feature that it’s probably worth making clear. It’s the giant pile of dirt that seems to be the source of the shenaniganry. Louisa is totally into it. More detail on the mound later.
Audio
The folks that went into creating the audio for this movie suck in various ways.
- It was pretty impossible to tell apart the score and effects from things that were actually happening. These weird dubstep noises keep happening when the Smeagols are around and I’m not sure if it’s a weird decision out of the sound guy or if Smeagol just keeps dropping sick beats everywhere he goes.
- I don’t know enough about movie-making to know who to blame for this so I’ll just blame the director because that’s what everyone else does. There’s this stupid convention that we see in movies all the time, this one included. If there’s a piano in the house, somebody is going to play it badly and it will be made part of the score. I might have to start leaving movies when I see a piano.
- Throughout the movie, the sound mixing seemed a bit off. Whenever a sound would pan through the earphones, it would go in the opposite direction of the corresponding action. I have since realized I had my earphones in the wrong ears. Whoops.
More Random Plot Points
i) Ants - There’s an emphasis on ants in the movie because they’re supposed to parallel the Smeagols. Sam learns ants in school and gets an ant farm, then tells his dad how ants are all male except the queen who’s needed for reproduction. Later we learn that Native people used to worship the mounds, believing they were home to an all-male race (the Smeagols) that would have to impregnate a human woman to reproduce. There’s a ton more instances of emphasis on ants but I won’t talk about that because it’s boring, all that matters is the parallel with the ants and the Smeagols.
The problem is that literally nobody cares about ants. Possible exceptions are ant experts (antsperts?) but nobody cares about them either. There’s nobody afraid of ants, and I’m not convinced comparing your supernatural monster to them is a winning strategy. It’s a common enough device to compare your unnatural monster to something real so the audience has something to be afraid of, but here we get to see that work in reverse. They took a reasonably scary DJ Smeagol and associated them with the things you casually shoe away when they get too close to your sandwich.
ii) The Mound - They extend the ant parallel by having a giant mound in the yard. It’s referred to an Indian Burial Mound but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing buried there until the Smeagols bury a lady they killed in there towards the end. I suspect someone was watching old Scooby Doo episodes, happened across and misheard the term “Indian Burial Ground”, and made a movie based only on those three words. The only reason they called it an Indian Burial Mound is because “giant pile of dirt” would sound stupid and uninteresting.
John contacts an expert on mounds (because apparently that’s a thing) and asks him to come see it. When the expert realizes the mound is significant and comes to see it, John tears it down because fuck that guy. The expert tells us about the mound and that’s when we learn about the Smeagols being like ants. So now we know that the Smeagols are deities, they’re like ants, and we don’t want to watch this anymore.
iii) Teacher Wants John’s Dick - When John first brings his kids to school, we find that Sam’s teacher Cassandra is a fan of John’s work. The secret subplot of the movie (way more interesting than the main plot) is Cassandra trying to ladybone John the whole time. This subplot reaches its climax (tehe) after the babysitter John hired was found dead and Cassandra asks John if he wants her to stay the night. “I know someone’s dead and you’re under suspicion, but we should, like, totally fuck”, she said. Or at least she would have if I wrote the movie. John rejects her.
Later when the babysitter’s body is found and John is being questioned at the police station, Cassandra watches Sam and Lou at their house. When John gets home, he finds Cassandra with her throat slit. With her dying motion, she apparently points out Louisa to implicate her. I, however, suspect she was making one final reach for John’s crotch.
The Funnies
As usual, I’m gonna slam out a few jokes I couldn’t smoothly integrate into the rest of it because I’m bad at this.
- Sam finds a loaded gun in a piano. John freaks the fuck out, seemingly thinking the gun is sentient and will shoot everyone on its own. We get a dramatic scene where John tries to carefully get the gun from Sam, presumably so the gun doesn’t get frightened. Then he buries the gun a few feet deep in the yard so it can’t rise up and kill everyone in their sleep.
- Authors in movies always make me want to become a writer. As far as I can tell, they don’t actually do anything but are wealthy anyway. Just sounds really dope, is all.
- Watching these kinds of movies makes me question people owning cats. They always seem to end up in multiple pieces.
- If you’re writing fiction somewhere remote, you should just assume things are trying to kill you. John has apparently never watched “The Shining” or “Misery”.
- At one point John fires up his computer and starts looking up stuff, reminding us why parents shouldn’t use search engines without supervision. And here’s a protip: Don’t search for “Raising teenage daughters”, “Daughters, changes”, and “Strange mound” in one sitting. You will absolutely get arrested.
- Louisa was kind of a jerk anyway. It’s probably for the best she got possessed or whatever because sooner or later somebody was going to need an excuse to kill her.
- Lou starts cleaning the house like mad at one point. Sometimes parents wish their kids would clean more but I’m pretty sure frantically cleaning at night can only mean your daughter has been violated by aliens [citation needed].
- Louisa alternates back and forth between being normal and really angry. TIL bipolar disorder is caused by alien sex. Must remember to call Science.
Final Thoughts
Altogether the movie was pretty alright. A crazy race of Ant-Smeagols is a bit of a silly concept but at least it’s original. Not much of a horror movie though. It’s nice that they didn’t rely heavily on random loud noises to make you jump. But the flipside is that they were apparently banking on people being afraid of ants or really hating Lord of the Rings as the source of the scariness. I’m not sure if I’d watch it again any time soon but I don’t regret watching it the first time, so that’s something.
