SHOCK reviews new Canadian body horror film LET HER OUT.
The madly prolific team behind Canada’s Black Fawn Films can always be relied on to paint the screen red and, lately, seem dedicated to pushing the gore envelope to stratospherically sanguinary heights. Witness their recent slime-soaked shocker BITE, a movie that fearlessly dumped buckets of putrescence on its audience and won the respect of contemporary gorehounds worldwide. But as sloppy and sick as BITE got, it aint nuthin’ when stacked against LET HER OUT, one of two new films the studio has in festival circulation (the movie premieres at the U.K.’s Horror Channel FrightFest on August 25th while the other, BED OF THE DEAD, takes its first bow at the 2016 Fantasia International Film Festival).
LET HER OUT is directed by Cody Calahan (the ANTISOCIAL films) and stars Alanna LaVierge (in an intensely physical performance) as Helen, a Toronto bike courier whose mother was a pregnant prostitute who attempted to abort her with a pair of sewing scissors. Said act succeeded in accidental suicide and the termination of Helen’s twin. Now living a relatively healthy, untroubled adult life, Helen gets hit by a car and, while receiving treatment in hospital, discovers that the remains of her dead twin have been absorbed into her brain and are now growing there. While the chatty surgeon explains this to her and schedules the necessary surgery, Helen starts to lose it, suffering blackouts and memory wipes. Soon, she’s manifesting evidence of her spectral sibling physically as well and before you know it both her mind and body are in complete and total lethal revolt.
LET HER OUT has its share of problems but the most glaring by far is Adam Seybold’s script. The idea is sound; the whole “tumor twin” angle hasn’t been explored in the genre since the Stephen King/George A. Romero flick THE DARK HALF and it’s nice to see it given an intimate, feminine overhaul. But it’s Seybold’s dialogue that threatens to derail LET HER OUT. The film’s structure and plotting are so simple and stripped down and accessible that it simply doesn’t need the endless, leaden, expository verbiage that spills out unconvincingly out of every character’s mouth. The picture needs either better, more natural wordplay or better actors (some of the supporting cast is lacking) to navigate those words. But LET HER OUT is so potent visually that we understand instinctually what’s going on and we just don’t need it hammered out this explicitly.
Thankfully Calahan’s sense of style is so very rich that we forgive the film its spoken stumbles. Every second of this thing is sensual. There’s an obvious influence of Michael Mann and Nicolas Winding Refn in the saturated neons and deep blacks and fetishized imagery, but having that sheen draped over the after-hours Toronto streets feels fresh and dangerous. The film gets better as it goes along too. As Helen’s body and mind go into further revolt, so does Calahan’s directing and Duncan Chase’s editing, the two of them hacking and slashing scenes to disorienting effect and letting composer Steph Copeland’s tone-centric electro-sound and fury batter the audience into submission.
And then…the aforementioned, seriously gross gore comes.
The film’s big money shot FX meltdown (courtesy of Shaun Hunter and Carly Nicodemo) is truly revolting. We won’t spoil it in gynecological descriptive detail here, but suffice to say it’s the kind of practical puke sequence that would have been saddled with an X in the ’80s. My, how tolerant of splatter the world has become…
Ultimately, LET HER OUT is a simple, psyche-body horror film whose power is somewhat diluted by its need to consistently spell itself out. But it’s ample visceral and almost overwhelmingly stylized. And it plays its horror straight, which in this day and age of insufferable “ironic” horror comedies, is more than welcome…
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