Screenhead

I’ve said it before and it bears repeating–Blu-ray is awesome in that it makes everything old brand new again, and thanks to the rerelease of Frailty on Blu-ray, I can bring you a brand new review of it!  Huzzah!

Frailty really is one of the better horror / suspense / thrillers you’re going to find, and I’ll tell you why.  First, though, we must go through the plot.

There’s a family down south, and at first glance, they’re a pretty solid, well-adjusted bunch.  The father’s a mechanic whose wife recently died in childbirth with their second son.  But the oldest boy takes good care of the youngest, and the father does his level best to stay involved.  The family is happy if a bit poor, so all’s about as well as it can get.

Until one day when the father receives a vision from God that he and his happy family have been tasked with a very important mission, to find and kill demons set loose on the earth.  They look like regular people, you see…but they harbor terrible secrets.  Murderous secrets.  Thus, the killing spree that follows is strictly necessary…but the oldest boy isn’t so sure about this, and rebels against his father’s guidance.

Thus we embark on a long strange journey filled with twists, and that’s what’s so absolutely great about Frailty.

Nothing about this will be predictable.  in fact, the last fifteen minutes or so will feature a skein of surprises so patently unexpected that you will literally have no clue what’s coming for that entire time.  The movie will unexpectedly veer off into this dark corner, where everything that bursts out of its multiplicity of shadows is unlike anything you may have expected.  Frailty’s stock in trade is a stark, cold terror, the kind you can only imagine when your father describes a killing spree as “God’s work”.

I don’t remember the last time I was so outright thrilled by a movie as I was by Frailty.  Especially by that last fifteen minutes.

It may be slow, but you can rest assured that any slowdown in the pacing is because the movie is building to something dark and surprisingly bloodless.  You might expect gushers of the claret on this one, but you’d be once again surprised–they put only a minimum into this.

Frankly, I love this movie, I expect you’ll love it too, and the Screenhead Ten Scale gives it due love by handing up an eight out of ten, bowing only to the slow parts as a small problem that almost helps the movie overall.  There’s no adrenaline rush here, just that cold creeping terror.

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