The Loved Ones - Aussie Horror

Since the Olympics have been on I have mostly been watching that and ignoring my DVDs and the cinema listings, but I did manage to squeeze in 'The Loved Ones' the other day. This tiny low budget cult Australian teen blood-fest was recommended to me through my usual channels (Radio 5 & the Guardian). At only 80 minutes long, it manages to pack in a lot of ick and turns on its head most of the usual conventions of teenage expectation.

The film follows Brent, his girlfriend Holly and best buddy Jamie on their prom night. Here I was thinking that they only have prom nights in the US - I guess the Americanisation of world culture is creeping into classrooms faster than I realised.  Do kids have them here in the UK now even?  Anyway, Brent is asked to the prom by Lola, who he lets down gently in favour of his girlfriend. While this is going on, Jamie asks out the school's cleavagey goth-chick over whom he has clearly been fantasising for some time. Each of Brent and Jamie now go on to have prom night experiences that differ from quite a lot from conventional expectation.

The main action focuses around Lola and her reaction to Brent's rejection of her.  And what a reaction. She kidnaps him, ties him up in her kitchen and - with the help of her father - proceeds to torture and maim him. We are treated to an extremely sick version of the father-daughter relationship, in which she is a sadistic Daddy's girl who likes to bring home 'unworthy' boyfriends for her father to 'disaprove' of. There is a lot of blood in this film, and if you think you might be put off by broken bones, nailing feet down, drill-bits and the rest then the film's probably not for you. For someone like myself who enjoys the escapism of this kind of unhinged horror fare, it's hide-behind-the-cushion stuff of surprising quality. And though it's the blood and the gore that on the surface provide the 'ick', it's the relationship between Lola and her parents that make the film truly disturbing.

The film's lighter moments arise from Jamie's date with the Emo's wet dream Mia, and his desperate attempts to impress her while she cooly gets higher and higher on a cocktail of weed and vodka. But in the end this is all about the sort of bloody revenge that many teenagers have probably fantasised about exacting upon the various bits of the world that refuse to conform to the expectations that they have. In one sense it hails from an extension of the Buffy canon in which the metaphor for high-school-as-literal-hell is taken to a new extreme, in another sense it's an entertainingly gruesome shock-horror that should keep fans of the genre happy. It certainly kept me happy.