Gnaw DVD Review
Gnaw DVD Review
Gnaw-se-ating!
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British food just doesn't sound very appetizing to begin with. Blood pudding, spotted dick, bangers and mash, mushy peas? I mean, barf, right? Add human fingernails, boy's tongues and girl's hair-clots to the menu and you've got yourself a one-way trip to the nearest toilet in Bulimia-ville.
I see a helluva lot of horror movies, many of them riffs on cannibalistic cooks like Leatherface and Chop-Top of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame. It's an enduring theme and one that seems to lie in the bellies of all aspiring horror filmmakers like an undigested TV dinner from the early 1970s — we, the viewers, get all the fat calories and little of the lean meat.
However, in the case of Gnaw I was actually affected! This seldom happens. So kudos to the director, DP, and FX folks for not only making the bait appear yummy, but the final pot of soup is beyond putrid. Usually, these movies are all about the yuckiness and gross-out factor but Gnaw does something smart: in the beginning, the feast offered up to our doomed heroes is actually inviting. The pretty pies, cakes, puddings and cookies look like they just leapt off the recipe pages of Bon Appétit.
The Gnaw nightmare starts with a group of teenaged or/and 20-something cardboard cutout friends driving out to vacation at a lovely B&B in the English countryside. They enter the sumptuous, inviting premises at Blackstock Farm and don't find the proprietors on-site; but they do discover a gorgeous lunch spread out on the table for them. It's like Top Chef seasons 1-6 met Gordon Ramsey and went into the cuisine cook-off equivalent of High Noon.
Of course, behind the scenes there's the butcher (Hiram Bleetman) and the cook (Carrie Cohen), just waiting for some new ingredients. The movie definitely falls apart and flakes out when it comes to the clichés — our protein-packed protagonists are nothing special, the killer is just a big guy in a black rubber apron with a chainsaw, and the chef is an over-the-hurdle psychotic harridan — but I do gingerly recommend Gnaw from a visceral and visual standpoint. The special horror effects and the cinematography are really kind of great, and that's, er, rare for a direct-to-disc movie of this ilk.
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson