Billed somehow as a kind of psychological horror film, this slow and meandering disaster of a horror flick is a disgrace to the Hammer Horror name that has been sloppily slapped on it. If this is what comprises Hammer Horror today, then it’s time to close up fucking shop. First of all, the film mainly deals with divorce. The male character announces to his estranged ex-wife that he is getting remarried, so she simply offs herself and makes one-hundred percent sure that he will survive the family court. At least they won’t have to worry about custody, alimony and all that good stuff. Unfortunately, this man is an idiot who plans on marrying the nutty daughter of a cult leader and then he decides he wants to leave his kids alone with her because of all the wonderful things they have planned. So they decide to drive over to this dark and grisly looking lodge out in the middle of nowhere. Not only that, but it’s profoundly dark, which becomes a problem for the film as it becomes nigh impossible to see. So aside from being impossible to see and slower than cold molasses to get to a fucking point, the movie that the characters are watching (John Carpenter’s The Thing, a film from a man who actually knew what horror was) is much better than the movie that the characters are in. Before the only adult male character in the film leaves to go jack it to Pornhub for a number of days or whatever it is he does by himself; he decided to hand this crazy former cult lady a gun and show her how to use it. Gee, that was a great idea. Did this guy even bother to do a search before he started dating random women that he was going to marry? Sir, we have an entire manosphere full of information now and I’m pretty sure that “daughters of crazy cult leaders” might be on the list of women with major red flags.
And though she began the film as a decent person who tried to get along with the kids, we learned that she was a pill popper and without her pills, she apparently lost it. There’s a section of the film where it seems as if they’ve all died in some kind of gas heater explosion, though that is offset by meandering beforehand in which the crazy woman walks all of the way out into the wilderness and finds a weird cross-shaped building that will not open. Okay, let’s look at this a bit closely, folks. The building is small, but it has windows. She carries with her dozens of items that would have been useful in just smashing out the fucking windows. I mean, are the police really going to arrest her for breaking and entering? And if they did, well at least she could have explained to them the situation where her and the children would have been escorted out to safety. Instead, she merely walks back to the lodge. Keep in mind, this all happens after the power goes out, all the food goes missing (well, most of it – God was nice enough to leave some chili and crackers which means that he knows the power of chili) and several of their belongings. Most of it is found to be under the snow. Okay, that means that most of the food is actually still good and frozen, so I would have been out there digging it out.
Oh, by the way, there’s a whole bunch of “Repent, God is waiting for you” thrown about the movie, to which the children assuming that they are dead began to pray profusely. Now, you’d think that this would work and the children would ascend to heaven (along with the dog and the shrimps, yes there are shrimps in the movie for some odd reason) but that’s not what happened. Instead, she just continues to lose her mind as we see that the oldest boy has hung himself and states more or less that no one can die in this dimension. It is assumed that they are in a kind of purgatory, waiting for God to release them. So finally, after about an hour and forty minutes, our adult male character has finished his masturbation session and decides to go back to the lodge. It is there that he first confronts the crazy cult lady that he was going to marry. She points the gun up to her head, which he advises her not to do. She pulls the trigger once, nothing happens. Oh boy, now this has become a game of Russian Roulette. Now, here is the very moment where our adult male character who is biologically bigger and stronger (especially in the case of his physique) could have tackled her like a linebacker. In this scenario, he would have easily taken the gun from her and then would have had her sent to the nearest psychiatric hospital, where they would have had her under constant care and she would have had pills in a cup. The kids would have explained everything to the man who would have by then said, “you know what, fuck it” and probably would have stayed a single bachelor. Instead, she shoots him. Then she proceeds to sit him at the table like a living sex doll (just how did she get his body over there?) which makes sense, because all he wanted her for was her body (it was explained that she was a horrible cook, after all).
In any case, the crazy cult lady has the kids tied up (they were trying to escape in a vehicle, but the film never shows her preventing said escape) and then she begins to re-enact the cult stuff as the film closes on the picture of a loaded gun. So in my personal observation, if there wasn’t a gun in the film, much of this could be prevented. Now, there is a chance that the leftist (and I do mean leftist, go look them up) writers and directors of the film were trying to show how awful guns and religion are, but at the same time they wouldn’t allow any violence towards women that wasn’t caused by them. In other words, it is fine for a woman to blow her head off, but it is not fine for a man to tackle a gun wielding psycho to the ground in order to protect the safety of both her and her kids. Again, no one said he had to knock her the hell out, but anything that would subdue her until the right medical professionals would arrive would have been worth it. At least for the sake of the children. To be fair, they weren’t really fond of the woman anyway, there would be no objection. All in all, I wasted nearly two hours of my life on this bullshit. Do not watch The Lodge, do not give it money, support or anything where you have to devote time you’ll never get back to it. This proves that people have no idea what the hell horror is and it’s coming from a guy whose last movie was a children’s cartoon about a horse and a weird German couple who do movies that I would say are a completely different turn from horror. With The Lodge, we see horror turn into a caricature. Heck, I watched just forty minutes of an older B-Movie called Axe Giant: The Wrath Of Paul Bunyan and at least the film got to the point and I could further understand what was going on. The loggers had eaten Bunyan’s Ox and that pissed him off to the point in which he went into a homicidal rage. I’d actually recommend that over this meandering drivel that was marketing to me as horror. I must have made a million riffs over it, I wish I could have riff-tracked the whole thing. I honestly don’t think these writers and directors have ever been in a situation where their life has been threatened and I have. I understand what real horror looks and feels like. Someone get these idiots writing about topics that they actually have some experience with, like ridiculous social dramas or more movies about horses for young girls. By all means, keep them the fuck away from horror. The Lodge is insulting to horror fans. After this, I need a palette cleanser.
FINAL SCORE:
