Plank Face

At the start, a couple is parked by the side of a road in a forested area, and they decide they want to get frisky. After all, from a fire tower they didn't see anyone for miles around. Bad decision. Later a couple are headed into the forest to camp out. They are assaulted, and the man winds up in a primitive cabin. There are three women inside. A grandmother type, a mother type and a younger woman. The younger woman wears a Halloween type bunny mask. They are not very coherent and they hammer the point that he is not going to escape. It is a scenario that they are very feral, living with some interesting culinary habits. They are not particularly verbal. The man, Max, seems to understand that he is not going to go anywhere, no matter how circumstances may change. And this is where I feel the movie lost its way. For me, it fell flat, and they threw in the gross factor.

I got burned, you don't get burned. It's a 2016 horror movie. The acting is so amateur that you can see it as soon as you open the movie. Imdb rating is very high compared to this movie. In the movie, there are cannibals living in the forest, just like their counterparts. They are adopting someone. There is no limit to sexuality and nudity. I usually have incompatibility with Scandinavian films. I thought the movie was the movie of those regions, but it was American made. There was a similar mask in the movie cub - werb.

Thought it was a slasher/violence+horror movie. But guess not. Only the first few minutes of the movie had some killing/torture, then some when the movie is about to conclude. Everything was so kinky. Full frontal nudity from both male and females, graphic and disturbing sex scenes. Not so much to see. Just nude cannibals and graphic sex. Maybe that was what the movie wanted us to see. Pornography would be the best word to be used to describe this movie. Imagine you are a man and you have three females around you and one day they remove their clothes in front of you (not in this one). Don't know why the rating is so low, doesn't deserve all the hate. Not so many movies can be so graphic and sexually explicit like this one these days.

"Plank Face" is a strange horror movie that largely eschews scares and gore in favour of sex and nudity. It takes a run at doing something that I think is fairly unique, or would be, if it had been pulled off a little better.

For a "unique" film, it opens with stunningly familiar material, in which we see the bad guys kill some people. Slashers so often begin with this - think "Scream" and "Halloween". If that's not familiar enough, it even ticks off the most famous of the horror movie "rules": having sex gets you killed.

The movie then lurches into more unfamiliar territory, with a credit sequence that, unlike its opening scene, does not seem to belong to a typical slasher. We are introduced to the protagonist, a hipster-slash-outdoorsman, and his girlfriend, who are hiking through the woods. There, they run into another hipster-type, who chokes out the protagonist (in a fairly unrealistic scene). The protagonist comes to, and finds the other hipster raping his girlfriend. He promptly murders her.

None of this is as shocking as you'd expect; it just doesn't connect. It's handled unbelievably, and I think a large part is the pacing: this all happens before you know what's what.

Next, the young man is imprisoned by some yahoos who live out in the woods. First, they torture him by hammering a nail into his foot - which also seems pretty unrealistic as there's not enough blood or pain from the actor - and then they force him to eat offal.

Soon - much too soon, I might add - our hipster/outdoorsman is a happy member of the tribe, if that's what it is.

Throughout the ordeal he never loses his cover-boy sheen, as though the hut these people live in is actually on the beaches of Malibu. You would expect some kind of physical transformation to go with his caveman-like regression. You don't get it, unless you count the titular Plankface, and constant nakedness.

Why does the protagonist fall in line with these cannibal freaks so quickly? Was the part at the beginning with the rapist-hipster supposed to show that he had something caveman-like in his nature?

The plot of the film is different; the handling, unfortunately, is not different enough.

As Descartes opined, man (and thus his mores) is essentially the sum of his past experiences. Plank Face is premised on whether a traumatic experience wipe out that person and and more pertinently his mores. Indie director Scott Schirmer poses this question in a well paced suspenceful admospheric woodlands setting, done largely through excellent cinematography using very little dialogue (reminiscent of Hagazussa). The suspense is retained by the question remaining open to the very end. The traumatic event could have been counted over a great period of time which would have added Greater realized, but all and all, a great film done on a lower than $ 10 000 budget.