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There’s a certain style of movie that tends to bother me. It’s this deliberately tacky, chaotic, nightmarish satire of modern culture. John Waters is a master of it. It’s one of the reasons I disliked the second Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie. It’s also one of the reasons I’ve never been able to get completely on board with Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. I respect it, and I recognize what people like about it, but I just can’t make it work in my head. I’m the same way with John Waters. I respect him and I’m glad he’s in the world doing what he does, because I think he’s a force of good in the industry… I just can’t make his movies work for me. I feel the same way about early Peter Jackson. Brain Dead and Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles. I tried. I really did.

Maybe I lack a certain level of irony. I don’t know. I just don’t get it.

I tell you that to help explain why it’s strange to me that I enjoyed The Loved Ones as much as I did. Because it is very much that kind of movie. To me, The Love Ones was like if John Waters decided he wanted to make a torture horror movie and he called David Lynch to help him put it together. It’s a scattered, intensely violent, incredibly surreal movie with a bad case of musical ADHD.

The story is fairly irrelevant, mostly because its main purpose is simply to get the lead character kidnapped so he can be tortured for an hour or so. In this case, the lead character is an attractive young fella who rejects his mousey classmate’s invitation to the school dance. Said mousey girl is the antagonist of the piece and the source of the torturing. Some back and forth goes on, escaping and being recaptured and so on, but the story goes pretty much exactly how you would imagine based on the premise. There are no story surprises to speak of.

Really, what we’re dealing with is two main draws for this movie. The first is the style. It’s completely the opposite of what I usually like. It’s very in-your-face and, like I said, deliberately tacky and kitschy, in that John Waters tradition. Through the entire movie I was fighting with my natural impulse to dislike it, but I just couldn’t. There was too much to like.

I’m experiencing a bit of a shift in my tastes, and I think my love of this movie is a pretty good example how my interests have changed recently. There’s an argument that people like to put up against visually interesting movies which is “style over substance.” That’s become some sort of sin in the world of alternative cinema. It’s a catchall phrase thrown around to somehow artificially reinforce indie-cred. And honestly, if you’re an adult and you’re worried about indie-cred, then I’m probably not particularly interested in whatever you’re saying.

I myself am guilty of using that argument. In the past, I valued a film’s ability to tell a story over its ability convey emotion and paint an appealing image. Now, I argue that style IS substance when it comes to movies. Film is, by definition, a photographic medium. I don’t even know what “substance” people are looking for when they say “style over substance.” Sure, films tell stories and define characters. But more than anything, the purpose of a film is to convey a specific feeling or an idea or a philosophy through photography and sound engineering and performance.

That is something that I’ve been adding to my philosophy in regards to films. Style IS substance. If a film has a great story and interesting characters, that’s fantastic. But it’s not the main concern. That’s what novels are for. As a writer, my natural impulse is to look for the story first. I’m coming around though.

When I watched this movie, which has only the most barebones story possible (which is also mostly lifted from a number of other similar films) it was a struggle to admit that I was really enjoying it, despite the unimaginative story. I don’t say that to insult or disparage the abilities of the writer. They didn’t miss the mark or fail at delivering an appropriate story. The story needed to be simple to serve its function. The whole purpose of this story is to get this one character in a room with this other character. The story sets up the more impressive qualities, its atmosphere, visually interesting photography and one dynamite performance by an actress that impressed the hell out of me.

That’s the star of the film, Robin McLeavy. I say she’s the star, even though the lead actor is Xavier Samuel. Robin is so fucking awesome in the movie though. She plays Lola Stone, the shy girl in school who (along with her creepy lecherous dad) kidnaps her high school crush, Brent (Xavier) for the express purpose of torturing him and turning him into a Jeffrey Dahmer style zombie, all set in a demented recreation of a school dance held in the living room of her trailer home.

I mean, right there, the story is instantly dismissible. It’s a completely ludicrous plot. It’s part Misery and part Texas Chainsaw Massacre (specifically the dinner scene) and part Blue Velvet. It’s simple but it’s a winning combination in my book. One that may not have worked if Robin McLeavy wasn’t such a fucking rock star. Her performance is a perfect blend of sympathetic, sweet, sexy and, best of all, completely batshit insane. She is amazing and I hope to see her in a hundred more movies. Combine her acting with director Sean Byrne’s seemingly innate sense of visual style (this is his first feature) and this movie just wins. Start to finish it’s a straight up win.

There is a weird B story that only really loosely connects with the rest of the movie, and that centers around Brent’s friend going out on a date with the rebellious rocker/goth girl. It’s strange and out of place yet somehow pairs with the main story rather nicely. It’s functions as a break from the constant barrage of insanity and chaos that Brent is going through, and it gives us a rather pleasant prom experience (for those of us who would have rather sat in the parking lot getting stoned and playing backseat baseball than going to the actual prom itself) as most of that story centers around drug fueled teenage monkey-business.

Of course, it helps that the rebellious teenage rocker/goth chick was exactly the kind of girl that teenage Joe would have been madly, desperately, pathetically in love with, so I was able to live vicariously through the awkward fumbling of Brent’s dopey friend.

When the stories tie together in the end it’s surprisingly sweet and sad and satisfying. The characters are drawn well and you feel compelled to cheer for everyone. I wanted Brent to escape and reunite with his girlfriend. I wanted the awkward friend to score with the hot rocker chick. I wanted Lola to capture and torture more people for my amusement.

I will say that I was pretty happy when the creepy dad exited the movie. I could have done without his character entirely.

The Loved Ones is a fun movie. It’s scary enough movie and it’s certainly disturbing in parts. It’s silly as all hell but not obnoxiously so. It’s sexual in the demented sort of way that tends to be celebrated among horror fans (sexy while drenched in gore and depravity, usually involving one or more parties being murdered horrifically) and it’s surprisingly sweet and was one of those rare movies that I didn’t want to end. It’s another score for the Australian horror film industry, which has a pretty damned solid record as of late.

I look forward to more from all involved.