Southbound
Directors: Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath, Radio Silence
Cast: Chad Villella, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Kristina Pesic
May 17, 2016
Reviewed by Brian M. Sammons
I love horror anthologies, and no, not just editing them myself. Okay, mandatory subtle self-promotion out of the way, let’s move on. I think the horror genre needs more anthologies, and for a good long while we weren’t getting all that many. Well in the past few years that has changed, and quite a few anthologies have been coming out, but honestly, they have been a mixed bag of quality. Including the series that this movie uses as that old marketing highlight: “from the makers of…” and here I’m talking about the V/H/S/ movies. Of which there are three, and I only really liked one (the second one) of them. So yeah, while I love the idea of anthologies, this one didn’t have the most stellar of pedigrees going for it. So was this collection of short movies a winner or an exit ramp best avoided? Well grab a map, or now days a GPS, and let’s hit the road south to find out.
The stories here don’t have a traditional wraparound tale to introduce all of them, but they are interconnected and how they handle that was something that I thought was very well done and quite fun. As for the short flicks themselves, the first segment starts off with some good mystery and a brief WTF moment. Unfortunately, for me at least, the “big secret” they were setting up for later was very obvious right from the start, but that premature revelation didn’t ruin things too much. From there one tale blends into another, this one about a girl rock band on a road trip that sadly goes nowhere. This short was more of an idea, a setup, that was never fully paid off. It’s a bit of a disappointment, and sadly not the only time this movie disappointed. From there the next story starts off with a bang about a guy driving alone at night who hits someone with his car. It had a bit of a Twilight Zone feel to it as weird things happen and you don’t really know why. While it doesn’t fully work as a self-contained story, it had loads of atmosphere, gore, and was overall very enjoyable. The next segment, about a brother looking for his sister, was the most disappointing for me. It starts off well, has a lot of potential, introduces some very cool supernatural/occult elements, and then does nothing with them. When it was over I actually said aloud, “that’s it?” and that’s never a good sign. The last segment is a bit of almost home invasion fun, and it works. It provides some answers to some of the questions left dangling by previous stories, and does so in a cool, subtle way. I love it when filmmakers have a little faith in their audience and don’t feel the need to club you over the head with every plot point to make sure you get it.
So of the four stories, two I liked and two I thought were okay but flawed. What about the special features on this new DVD from Sony? Well they include a commentary with about a half dozen people or so, which makes it a pain to list all the people doing it, so I’m not going to do so. But it was both a lot of fun and more than a little informative, so it’s a winner in my book. There is a collection of deleted scenes, another collection of outtakes, a photo gallery, and a collection of trailers. For an old DVD it’s pretty well packed with goodies, but I got to wonder, why release it only on DVD? Where’s the Blu-ray love? Far worse films than this get the HD treatment, so the fact that Sony chose to bring this out only in the older, cheaper format did leave me scratching my head.
For me, Southbound was about 50/50. Pretty much all of the stories had atmosphere, were well-acted, and none of them were really bad, but some did feel not fully developed. Like the kernel of an ideal, but one that was never allowed to pop. But one of the best things about anthologies is their buffet-style approach, so if you don’t like one story, you’ll probably like one, or hopefully more, of the others. So while this was another uneven collection for me, you are bound to like other parts of it than I did. I’m playing the odds here, and going to give this one a conditional recommendation.
