Southern Gothic – Podcasting Them Softly

This was something else, and aside from a few well placed moments of black comedy and some decent atmospherics, kind of a WTF waste of time. Grand Isle refers to the swampy Louisiana island that kooky alcoholic war veteran Walter (Nic Cage) and his bizarre, manipulative wife Fancy (Kadee Strickland) are confined to during a hurricane sometime circa 1988. They hate each other, he’s a cantankerous, mean spirited drunk and she’s a slinky, untrustworthy wannabe femme fatale and the young man (Luke Benward) that he hired to fix the fence before the storm hit is now stuck in their house with them, a hapless pawn in their half crazed mind games with each other that ultimately end in murder. We know this because there are flash forwards to the future where Buddy, soaked in blood, is being periodically and lazily interrogated by a suspicious detective played by a sneering Kelsey Grammar. This thing tries to be a sultry, southern gothic potboiler and provide a decent mystery but it just can’t keep its story straight or its ducks in a row enough that we care nor comprehend what’s going on. Cage is kind of a hoot here though as the misanthropic asshole drunkard, swilling down an entire case of Pabst Blue Ribbon only to line the bottles up on the fence while Buddy is fixing it and go up to the roof to blast them with a scoped rifle just to shake the poor kid up, lol. Strickland hams it up a lot as the wife and you’ve gotta give her credit for such a crazy performance, whether she’s slowly serving mint juleps or taking a candlelit bath with Billie Holliday’s Strange Fruit warbling off a turntable in the background she’s like a weird southern belle Jessica Rabbit or something. Benward is unfortunately just bland and very not charismatic which is felt throughout, and Grammar does his best with his few scenes and is always some kind of presence but his efforts, although garnished with a hilariously over the top southern dandy accent, are kinda lost in the shuffle. I feel like this setting, idea and cast would have been great with a way better script but as it is there’s just nothing of substance there. Two cages out of five.

-Nate Hill

A disgraced nightclub bouncer faces off against a psychotic zealot vampire preacher. Quite a crazed concept ripe for hyperactive exploitation thrills, and yet Southern Gothic plays it pretty low key and laconic, for the most part anyway. Moody where other films would have been brash, it’s a nice atmosphere piece with gore galore and a gonzo central performance from William Forsythe as Enoch Pitt, a man of the lord who has strayed from the path. Bitten by a vampire, the already sleazy Pitt turns into a full on monster, tearing up the small Deep South town of Redemption and building an army of the undead. Hazel Fortune (Yul Vasquez) is traumatized and broken by the death of his young daughter, until he meets young Hope (Emily Catherine Young), who crosses Pitt’s vision and finds herself in mortal danger. This puts the two men on a vengeful collision course of blood, retribution and carnage. Ok, so I’ve made it sound a little more epic than it actually is, but that’s more or less how it goes down. Energetic it ain’t, more of a slow burn than anything else. Firmly rooted in B-movie territory in terms of both budget and script, but entertaining and distinctly flavoured nonetheless. Vasquez is moody and four, but dangerous when he needs to be. Forsythe, as usual, is the acting equivalent to a junkyard bulldog let off the chain, chewing scenery faster than he can munch carotid arteries, and loving every campy, frightening minute of it. Not the cream of the horror crop per sé, but reasonable enough Saturday night horror background noise fodder.

-Nate Hill