Southbound - An Effective Rendition of Purgatory (JAR OF FATE #2)
Like many horror fans, I obsessively collect horror movies on DVD and Blu-Ray. They sit in piles around my tiny apartment. Some are collector’s editions, some come from Scream Factory, lots of them are gifts. Some come from the $5 bin at Walmart, and a lot come from library sales where they’re only $1. Or that time HMV went out of business and I bought their entire horror collection for like $100. And sure, I may have four copies of Carrie, but I regret nothing.
Unfortunately, obsessively picking up horror movies means there’s a lot I haven’t watched. Whether it be that I’ve never seen the movie before, or I haven’t seen this particular version, or I have never cracked open the DVD because the movie is streaming and I’m lazy.
How do I solve this guilt I have as I sit streaming Netflix while piles of DVD’s surround me, judging quietly? I made a TO BE WATCHED jar, or as my friend Zo named it; JAR OF FATE.. I went through my collection and wrote down all the movies I wanted to watch on little scraps of paper and whenever I want to watch something, I pull randomly from the jar.
Second random pick is Southbound, a 2015 anthology flick directed by Radio Silence, Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, and Patrick Horvath.
Anthologies can be such a hit or miss, it’s such a hard task getting a bunch of stories to flow easily together and make sense. Southbound, I think, managed that. While there are a lot of loose ends here and some slightly frustrating non-answers, you can’t deny that this flows soooo smoothly it’s basically a jazz band.
Basic Premise:
Five stories flow into each other as we follow a highway and a small town that turns out is basically hell. Two men are fleeing strange hovering creatures but find themselves in a loop, consistently returning to a gas station/motel. Eventually the hovering creatures kill one of them while the other man runs into the hotel to live over and over again a scene where he couldn’t save his daughter.
In that same motel, three women in a band leave but their van breaks down on the side of a highway, luckily a couple picks them up and takes them to their home for the night. Too bad that couple is actually in a cult.
One girl escapes only to be hit by a man driving the highway in the dark. He rushes her to a hospital which is seemingly abandoned and tries to save her life. She dies, he leaves, and we discover the 911 operator helping him was actually a demon in a payphone booth.
Which takes us to a bar where a man comes in waving a gun trying to save his sister. He kidnaps her as she doesn’t want to leave, the two drive endlessly down a dark desert road until he finally gives up. The sister takes the car and drives back to town, passing a young girl.
The young girl joins her family as they drive to a rental house to stay the night before they drop her off to college. But they soon find themselves under attack from three men wearing masks. The men kill the parents and accidentally kill the girl. The two surviving men remove their masks and they’re the two men from the start of the film.
IT'S PURGATORY BABY!
Here’s what I loved:
The overall concept is really, really great. I love the lore of this strange hell/purgatory. Every character is there for a reason. The two men are clearly stuck in hell because they’ve killed a family, even if it was for revenge. The three girls are there because something happened to their friend Alex. The man who attempts to save the girl’s life seemingly has been allowed to leave. Perhaps he has completed his punishment by trying to save her. The young demon woman whose brother tries to save her, hints that she killed their parents. And the family at the end, the father has obviously done something horrible.
While there are a few gaping plot holes, some of the minor details are really satisfying. When the brother comes to rescue his sister, he has clearly aged and is almost an old man, whereas his sister is still very young, because she doesn’t age in hell.
The creepy hovering creatures in the first short are VERY effective. Just looming in the distance, black and strange against the bright colors of the desert. And as the two men drive, more appear. It’s a really terrifying image. Unfortunately, by the time they get up close – it doesn’t work as well. They’re still really cool looking but don’t work as well close up in the bright light.
During “The Accident” short, the man is in an empty hospital being coached via phone on how to save this girls life. He has to put a tube down her throat, cut her open, and compress her lung. It is absolutely horrifying to watch. I think this is probably my favorite short as from start to finish it’s hard to look away.
Here’s the frustrating thing though – the story feels a little incomplete. There’s A LOT of unanswered questions. First one being – who was that little girl and what did that family do to them? I’m referring to the first and last story. We understand that the little girl is Mitch’s daughter, and that something happened to her that Mitch couldn’t stop. In the final short we realize the Father from that story did something to the little girl. The wife was unaware. I see a lot of people online saying that little girl is the grown up girl in the final short, that she was kidnapped. But the wife has no idea, and there’s no way a man is gonna bring home a random little girl and be like….look what I found! Let’s raise her! I believe it’s something a lot more sinister. But again, we don’t know. It’s never told.
The same goes for the three girls in the band, what happened to Alex? We genuinely have no clue. But it’s obviously bad enough that they’ve ended up in hell. Why did the guy in “The Accident” end up on that road? What was his sin?
BUT – if we put the plot holes aside, this is a really interesting anthology. Every short could hold their own and I was genuinely interested the whole time. There’s some really effective imagery and moments that make it pretty horrifying. There’s no jump scares per say, but some scenes will stick like glue to your brain. And isn’t it kind of horrifying to think that most likely all these people are just constantly living these stories over and over? Constantly being punished endlessly. Damn…..
I’d recommend it, but you’re going to need to come up with your own plot lines to be satisfied.
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