I decided to scan the previous reviews in case there might have been some redeeming quality that I overlooked, but there was no such quality. There isn't even a consensus on how to categorize the film-- is it horror or thriller or drama or comedy or Southern Gothic or all of the above or none of the above? No consensus, because there is no there there.
Reviewer John Anthony Mazzei of Cleveland writes, "The viewer sees all but not the players. Two rounds from a twelve gauge and a wordless epilogue close the movie." However, assuming for the sake of argument that there does exist in literature such an self-contradictory device as a wordless epilogue, it's as flimsy and pointless as a Kardashian's see-through nightie.
Beatrice, a young interior decorator with the world's worse taste in men, is the long-suffering girlfriend of cynical, sarcastic. pain-in- the-ass, epileptic Owen. After three years of unprotected relations, dumbbell Beatrice is with child, and she compounds her stupidity by badgering Owen that they absolutely have to drive out-of-state somewhere to see Owen's crazy grandmother Violet and crazy sister Pearl, both of whom he hasn't seen in eleven years and does not want to ever see again. After arriving at Grandma's house, even dumbbell Beatrice can understand that grandma and Pearl are not just ha-ha crazy but bats--t crazy, but she and Owen keep hanging around until one day, Pearl splatters the guts of both Owen and Grandma all over Grandma's kitchen with Grandma's own shotgun.
Beatrice, cowering on the kitchen floor, survives unscathed, and the twisted pastor of Grandma's church has pulled up to the house in his Lincoln Continental and is lurking outside with a tire iron in his hand. That is the wordless epilogue? What unspoken pearls of wisdom do we learn here?
1. When a healthy, attractive young woman with a career and a nice apartment has the world's worst boyfriend for three years, she should cut her losses and kick him out before she gets knocked up and not wait until she is feeling too old and too attached to start to look for someone better. 2. Like a broken clock, even the world's worst boyfriend is still right twice a day, at least when it comes to his own damn bats--t crazy relatives, and his butt-in-sky girlfriend should learn to butt out and give him at least an ounce of credit. 3. Don't leave a twelve-gauge shotgun around the house for the deranged, disfigured relatives up in Grandma's attic to find.
Thing is, moviegoers like me may not mind quirky black humor and dark family secrets of mayhem and murder and deranged, disfigured relatives who stay up in Grandma's attic, but we don't want to sit through it all and then get no resolution or redemption in the end--only people's guts splattered all over Grandma's kitchen and moviegoers scratching their heads.
Usually, moviegoers like me can get enough of a hint about where the movie is headed before we see it or at least before we sit through more than the first ten or twenty minutes. Many years ago, before the internet and this website, someone I knew insisted that we had to go to a fantastic new film called Halloween at the mall theater, but as many times as I asked, he would say that, no, he didn't know anything about what kind of film it was or who was in the film but that he knew for a fact that it was a great film that we absolutely had to go see. So we did to the theater, and the house was packed, but within three minutes into the film, I said, no, I'm sorry, I am not sitting through this, you should have told me, and then I got up and left. And unless maybe we are watching a John Waters film-sort of film and know what to expect, we do NOT want to see white-haired, arthritic, Bible-thumping Grandma masturbating herself to a televangelist-—it's as clever and subtle as a pipe wrench.
I would though have more respect for writer/director Richard Bates, Jr. if he had cast his own grandmother from real life to play crazy Grandma Violet.
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