Robert B. (rbrown) from STARKVILLE, MS
Reviewed on 3/15/2019...
There must be something in the water in Australia, because horror films from there are just BRUTAL. Case in point: The Loved Ones, in which a good-looking teenage guy turns down the mousy girl at school when she asks him to be her date to a dance. So what does she do? She gets Daddy to kidnap him and bring him to the house for her very own end-of-school dance. Unfortunately for the guy, there’s very little dancing involved; instead, he’s subjected to all manner of torture. The film would be easy to dismiss if it weren’t so well-made-—the technical aspects are all first-rate, and the actors are all very good. There’s a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere concerning one of the guy’s friends taking the sheriff’s daughter to the dance, but I guess it’s there to give the audience a breather from the otherwise unrelieved sadism that’s going on at the mini-prom. There are a lot of nods to classic horror films, most specifically The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Carrie, but those well-versed in the genre will find other filmic shout-outs as well. I watched the R-rated version, but there’s an unrated version floating around for those who want to check out how much further the film can go in its torture scenes. I recommend it, albeit cautiously, for gore-hounds; all others might want to give it a large berth.
