It's been some seventeen years since filmmaking buddies and Tennessee natives Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen made a movie. And if you've ever seen their preliminary debut, Five Across the Eyes, then you have a pretty good idea as to why there's been such a long downtime between projects. Shot with MiniDV cameras over nine nights in the sticks around their hometown, Five Across the Eyes is really scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to regional exploitation. It's a grungy, vile mess miscalculated to make some sort of provocative splash rather than tell anything close to a compelling story, cynically riding on the coattails of a new millennium vogue in "torture porn" and New French Extreme while vainly aspiring to some kind of corporeal anti-art. There are plenty of trashy sub-movies like Five Across the Eyes to go around; and like all cycles of exploitation, it would have been no surprise if it happened to be one of a million fly-by-night credits for a pair of filmmakers who never did anything else. This is not the type of movie that you can show to potential investors unless you want to make even more half-hearted, morbidly navel-gazing stuff like it. But Swinson and Thiessen clearly went into it with a reach exceeding their grasp. In a 2008 interview with one "S Cockwell" of the indie horror site Eat My Brains, when asked what they had planned for a follow-up project, Swinson responded, "Something with a lot less screaming," a tongue-in-cheek indicator of an implicitly unserious opinion of their own film and the agenda to parley it into something actually good. But there's no way that their freshman effort didn't prove to be an impediment more than a fulcrum in their careers.
Crawling out of the barrel of recent exploitation history, Swinson and Thiessen are finally back with Hunt Her, Kill Her, which stars newcomer Natalie Terrazzino as a single mother who takes the night shift at a factory only to find herself trapped inside with a group of masked intruders. Just like Five Across the Eyes, this sophomore feature was shot entirely on the pair's home turf of Morristown, Tennessee, albeit over seven months of nights and weekends rather than just nine days. But Five Across the Eyes, and despite the rare flourish of gore, this new film lacks an analogously juvenile, vomitous, screaming verve, being more tightly scripted around the pluck and ingenuity of Terrazzino's character in evading or disposing of her captors. The production is also, while being more conventional, also more consummate and professional-looking, with Thiessen especially, as the director of photography, getting to flex an undeniable talent for lighting and composition under decidedly limited circumstances.
As someone who had seen Five Across the Eyes, it was impossible to watch Hunt Her, Kill Her without finding myself distracted by the extra-diegetic curiosity of what the heck Swinson and Thiessen have been doing for all these years, and what sort of behind-the-scenes story has led to this project not only being completed, but picked up for a limited release by new distributor Welcome Villain. In terms of consistent technical competency, it's certainly a cut above the usual Gravitas Ventures crowd of super-low budget pick-ups that go right to V.O.D. after their obligatory two weeks at one or two metropolitan theaters, but not so much more than that as to make its reach into the major theater chains obvious. Welcome Villain pitches itself as "a safe space for dangerous films," but Hunt Her, Kill Her is nowhere near the gruesome class of, say, Terrifier 2, which would both make good on that banner tease, while also more narrowly targeting word-of-mouth so that Swinson and Thiessen's new film could compete with the big indie and major studio competition.
It's all very weird, and it wouldn't be at the forefront of my mind except that, while likable, Hunt Her, Kill Her just isn't much to write home about. It's a highly conventional thriller that doesn't seek to reinvent the wheel, but also fails to adequately stick the landing of its most modest aspirations. The best things about it are basically enterprising coincidences. The location that the filmmakers have chosen, having obviously little freedom to disturb an active work environment too much, does lend itself to a kind of natural tension. Though our heroine always manages to find enough hideaways to progressively turn the tables on the bad guys, one never quite gets over the extent to which so much of the movie shows Terrazzino being so desperately exposed, wondering around a naked shop floor that has not been designed or significantly rearranged to be advantageous to her. This naturally plays upon our anxiety, our sense that it's not just about the briefest second of wrong timing, but rather the gaping moments of total vulnerability. By the same token, though, certain close calls come off as especially unrealistic. And over time the natural tension that the location produces is depressed by a complementary realization that Swinson and Thiessen are picking and choosing certain stages of the location for the sake of their utility and convenience, erroneously taking for granted that the audience will not notice. For a thriller such as this, the establishment of a clear, fictional geography is especially important to not just a basic sense of realism, but also to the maintenance of tension. Instead, the vagueness of the filmmakers' use of spaces compounds at the back of your mind until you're totally disenchanted by the artifice. Once you realize it doesn't really matter where you are, physically, in a story, you sort of get hip to the fact that there's no point in suspending your disbelief about where the story itself is going. Terrazzino's in no real danger, because there's really no relation to anything, between spaces, between characters, or in the time between discrete events.
Swinson and Thiessen only have the sympathy for their protagonist to rely upon in order to sustain the spectator's interest, and that proves a tall order. Terrazzino's performance is rather decent, but Swinson's knack for dialog has not progressed very far beyond what it was with Five Across the Eyes. At least in that case, the atrociousness of much of it, combined with the run-and-gun style of the production, occasionally resulted in moments of unreal poignancy. And when it comes to the twist revelation of the identity of our heroine's oppressors, well, let's just say that Swinson and Thiessen may be seventeen years older, but that all that time and experience has not prevented them from settling for the most juvenile and maudlin cliches of the "woman-in-peril" movie.
Thiessen may be a solid cinematographer, but between himself and Swinson they can't manage to sew together a convincing action sequence. This isn't some grousing about "unrealistically strong women characters," either. Terrazzino's character is supposed to be unpredictably spry and resourceful, it's just that Swinson and Thiessen's imaginations are not up to the task of contriving scenarios that are truly ingenious. It all comes off as just so forced.
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