Butchers

Totally without guilt or regret Butchers is in there with the rural, hillbilly killer sub-genre that gave us Wrong Turn and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as it says on the poster. There’s no dispute about that.

It has however none to the elegance of the latter but all the savagery of the former. Director Adrian Langley doesn’t spare anyone either viewer or protagonists with a visceral ugliness that itches the skin during and after the film.

We are in familiar territory both in landscape and character when a car breaks down in the middle of nowhere with squabbling young student city types. The group decide to split up with a pair Taylor and Mike (Anne- Carolyne Binette and James Hicks) going to find the nearest garage while the other two Chris and Jenna (Frederik Storm and Julie Mainville) stay put. Natch there’s some playing away between the couples while there is danger lurking at the garage and in the forest.

You see the forest and local area is home and playground for brothers Owen (Simon Phillips) and Oswald (Michael Swatton) whom we’d earlier seen burying their mother, capturing a young woman after killing her partner, torturing and chaining her. Coming up to date she is caged in a shack, pregnant and mute, with something terrible in the room next door.

What develops is what anyone who has any sort of familiarity with the genre will expect with two mad brothers, one madder than the other and the young couples hoping around each other getting captured, escaping, getting killed so and so forth. Its wilfully nasty and cruel with the cast for the most part covered in blood and dirt baked in by the sun.

There’s blood and grue aplenty though not as the title explicitly suggests, cannibalism, as Owen says, ‘that’s a bit cliché’. It’s this self-awareness that writers Adrian Langley (also the director) and Daniel Weissenberger hide behind; clearly acknowledging that they are not doing anything new here so it’s a matter of take it or leave for the audience.

Butchers is available on digital download now and on disc from today.