Watched: Cold In July (2014).
I don’t know - maybe it’s the fact that I watched this after Predestination, which put a character in the lead role who subverted masculinity in more than a handful of ways. Maybe it’s the fact that the taste of Bad Turn Worse is still sour in my mouth, and both films fit into the loose genre of “southern noir”. Maybe it’s just the fact that this film uses the same title font as The Guest and has a similar soundtrack, but is a significantly inferior film, but this left me cold.
It’s funny - I think I’m at the point where I’m more than happy to watch a film where the lead cast is made up of men, but I switch off when the few women present are depicted as either harridans or victims. It’s a shame, too - this film almost had me, but there’s a scene about half-way through that attempts to shed light on just how bad the bad guys are, and it’s a scene of sexual violence taken to its most unpalatable conclusion. We never learn the woman’s name - at least Bad Turn Worse gave us that. She’s just a nameless victim whose entire purpose is to make the father of the aggressor angry enough to want to kill him. Which he does.
Remove a couple of scenes, and change that one scene to anything else, though preferably something unrelated to violence against women, and you’ve got a hell of a film here. As it is, it’s kind of a mess.