Back in 2009, when I fell sick during the Melbourne Film Festival and missed 18 films, the one film that I regretted missing most was this film, Sean Byrne’s “The Loved Ones”. It had its world premiere at MIFF and once screened, the buzz on this film began. It went to other international film festivals, and the positive reviews continued to pile in. More and more I hated the fact that I missed seeing this film. “The Loved Ones” is an Australian horror film (co-financed by MIFF), and it really is one messed up little film, that just seems to get darker and darker. Just when you think it can not get any worse, well, you get the picture.
The beauty of “The Loved Ones” is that it is something fresh and new, and it has unexpected twists throughout, so it is best to enter this thing as cold as possible, however if one was to sum up the film in a sentence, it would be “”Carrie” meets “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre””. This is Sean Byrne’s directorial debut and he has done a stellar job here, beautifully shot in bright garish colours (there is a lot of hot pink in this film), and he has infused the film with some great black comedy throughout too. Performances are great from both Xavier Samuel and Robin McLeavy, as our two main characters, Brent and Princess (Lola).
Unfortunately this film did NO business at the Australian box-office and I think the distributors of the film (Madman Entertainment) did the film absolutely no favours. They obviously didn’t know what to do with the film, and its release date got continually pushed back. Originally it was meant to come out around Valentine’s Day, which then got shifted to May, then June, then it was meant to come out in October around Halloween, when even this date got shifted. “The Loved Ones” ended up being released on November 4th 2010, exactly a month after the film had been released on blu-ray and dvd in the UK. What’s the big deal, you may ask? In this day and age, as soon as it is available in a home-video format, the film is downloadable via the internet, so anyone who wanted to see this film (and let’s face it, people who knew of it, had been waiting a long time) could download it a full month before it was released. The other thing Madman’s marketing team did, was produce a trailer for the film that gave away all of the twists, giving audiences no reason to come see the film. Seriously, if you want to watch this film, stay away from the trailer. As a result of all this, no-one came to see the film, which is a shame as this film needed to succeed, for the simple fact that it was different and special, and not just a cookie-cutter remake that we only seem to be getting these days.
Why would anyone want to finance films in this country, if ones that are so good, are not able to find an audience cinematically? Anyway, rant time is now officially over. Check the film out, because it is one sick little mother, and something that we, in Australia, rarely produce these days.
Ranked 21 in Top 25 of 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment