When I summarized the press kit for you all this week, I ended by saying that you could throw rocks at me if the movie turned out terrible. Well, director Brad Rego sent me a screener that I was able to finish watching tonight. The Killing of Jacob Marr isn’t going to be the next great horror film, but it was still very interesting and enjoyable to watch. Big thanks to Brad for forwarding me along the screener.
In The Killing of Jacob Marr, a mysterious object falls from the sky and young Jacob goes to retrieve it. Somehow the object warps his mind and makes him a homicidal murderer. After he kills his parents in the middle of the night, he disappears, never to be heard from again. Until now. His childhood home has been renovated into a get away cabin and five friends are renting it for the weekend to escape their monotonous lives. And Jacob isn’t happy. The group now must figure out what is going on and find out who is in charge of The Killing of Jacob Marr.
I always pay close attention to the production value and quality of a film. Although, as a film major, I’m always not completely able to demonstrate the best lighting and sound, I’m also not releasing anything to theatres or DVD. Anyway! The audio in this film is, honestly, pretty much perfect. I say pretty much perfect because there is a scene at the beginning where the sound of celery chopping is not matching the woman’s arms. I’ve never heard clearly, volume perfect audio before from an independent film. The lighting, while not its strongest at night, was executed during the day to match and mirror the snow, which impressed me as well.
The script was ok, nothing ground breaking, but good. At the beginning there wasn’t a lot of dialogue so it kind of made the mind wander, but one part in particular made me wonder. Is Jacob’s dad a bad guy, possibly molesting Jacob? That’s kind of the inclination I got from it. There’s a scene where they hit a deer, and while I usually don’t find animal’s getting hurt funny, there was just something about the whole thing in this film that made it…not upsetting. However, the girl in the scene with the earmuffs deserves to die…and I think she did.
As with every film, there were a couple things I didn’t care for. I thought Jacob would be younger, based on the description presented in the press kit. Two of the kills happen very fast. I actually had to rewind so I could figure out what was happening. The script contained a lot of gay jokes, which could be funny, but was a little overdone here. However, it is a realistic truth of our generation that we do talk like that. In my opinion, my taste, the gay jokes got a little stale. In one of the articles I posted earlier, it was said that The Killing of Jacob Marr wanted to show intelligent, nonstereotypical characters. Did it deliver this promise? I feel like half the characters displayed intelligence, while the other half ended up falling into the same horror character clichés.
Except one girl! I was very impressed that when the killer attacks, she doesn’t run! She attacks back. You don’t see that a lot in modern horror films. One of the directors Mr. Rego wishes to emulate is John Carpenter and I can definitely see two tributes to him in The Killing of Jacob Marr. Firstly, I felt like when Jacob kills his parents, some of the scene is very reminiscent to the opening scene of Halloween. Also, towards the end of the film there is a slow pan of the first floor of the house, which I saw as a tribute to the end of Halloween when they show the house and leave the audience guessing where Michael Myers disappeared too.
So, all in all, this was a great independent film. It certainly wasn’t a waste of time. There was a twist ending that I honestly did not expect. There is a scene where Jacob looks into the sky to see what he is hearing and it is….brilliantly filmed. Definitely a wow moment for the film. I think this is an important film for people to watch because it shows despite the budget, you can pull off quality work with a lot of dedication. Independent film makers should watch The Killing of Jacob Marr to see examples of what works and what doesn’t work. It will be showing February 25th in Foxboro, Massachusetts. Go see it!
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