Review of The Living and the Dead (2007) by Alex D — 29 Nov 2011

Here's a great idea for a horror film, a mentally retarded son want's to take care of his bed-ridden mother when the father goes off on business, and decides to not take his medication and tries to keep other people from interfering. Now take that great premise and take a shit on it because that seems to be what the director does after 30 minutes, because the rest of the film dissolves into a disjointed amateur art house mess. The only other good aspect I can say about this is that the director came up with this film to deal with the loss of both his parents, so in that regard the film is very cathartic.

Otherwise (spoilers if you're still interested) after the son unintentionally poisens/humiliates his mother the nurses and the father break into the house and cut the mom's stomach open, I think to get the pills out but she puked them up earlier. There's no dialogue, just music with cheap artsy effects for all of this. Then afterward you see the son jamming needles into his arm while sobbing, and this goes on for awhile until he has some weird dream where his parents are killing him while they're dead. Then he wakes up and approaches his mother who's seemingly fine and stabs her and the father in a rage. Then he greets people at a funeral for the mother, then the dad (who's alive again) yells at everyone, then the son thinks he sees his mom at the funeral alive and well, he runs off a little then pulls out a knife again and stabs himself to death, other weird shit happens after that I guess but at this point I stopped trying to follow it and just concluded that Simon Rumley is insane.

I'm not sure if the director thought he was making Pulp Fiction but he went waaay too far in depicting the son off his meds, because not a fucking thing made sense or connected with another, leaving the viewer with a very bizarre and ugly experience.