At the start of Shotgun Stories the camera lingers on a man's bare back, which is studded with a constellation of gunshot scars, a grim and largely-unexplained tattoo which presages the movie's terse approach to violence.
A low budget piece of sou
thern gothic, the film centres on a festering blood feud between the step children of a reformed roustabout called Cleaman Hayes.
Hayes' first three children were so ignored by their father that he barely named them before abandoning Son (Michael Shannon), Kid (Barlow Jacobs) and Boy (Douglas Ligon) while there were still children. But later Hayes finds religion, marries again and raises a second family as a pillar of the community. The older children simmer with a resentment that ignites into violence when everyone assembles for the funeral of the patriarch, and the eldest, Son, spits on his father's coffin.
As a revenge western which has near-Biblical pretensions, writer-director Jeff Nichols' Seven Fights For Seven Brothers broods authentically over the sins of the father, but his evocation of humid Delta life walks a blurry line between huffy machismo and pot-boiler parody. And even at 92 minutes the picture unfolds at a pace that would challenge Gandhi's patience.
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On general release
TIMBER FALLS (18)
**Forthrightness is an admirable quality in a crappy movie. "I'm OK," insists our bleeding hero. "And we're OK." "You are not OK," snaps his new wife, who is strapped to a table waiting for torture. "And we are not OK."
A stultifying blend of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, boot camp and maybe The Heaven And Earth Show, Timber Falls kicks off with a couple (Brianna Brown, above, and Josh Randall) ignoring a ranger's warning to avoid hiking a remote trail and reaping the consequences – namely getting kidnapped by religious loonies, including the obligatory monstrously-deformed psychopath with a signature weapon.
There's not much you haven't seen before, except for the villains' bizarre plan of forcing the hikers to conceive a surrogate child in their ensuite dungeon. Although, because they are God-fearing maniacs, they marry their two victims to each other first – they're not monsters, you know. Although this plot point sounds like it could offer up some satirical sideswipes at American Bible-belt values, it doesn't. Instead blood, torture, sex and skinny dipping ensue in a blood spatter flick that's no different from the same old anti-rural moonshine Hollywood's been bootlegging for decades.
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Showcase, Glasgow East and PaisleyThe full article contains 417 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
