By Ben Bussey
The new wave of anthology horror has tended to be a little haphazard; take the none-more-random ABCs of Death movies, or the Dread Central-produced Zombieworld and Monster Land, which literally strung together entirely unrelated short films. It’s nice, then, to see portmanteau movies which harken back to the great days of the subgenre with a loose but clearly identifiable unifying element. Southbound does just this, by setting its nightmarish tales along the same stretch of bleak, unidentifiable desert highway, situated somewhere between the middle of nowhere and the bowels of Hell, with Larry Fessenden on Crypt Keeper duty as a radio DJ.
Directed by V/H/S trilogy veterans Radio Silence, Roxanne Benjamin and David Bruckner, plus The Pact II’s Patrick Hovarth, Southbound follows the rules of the best anthology horrors by presenting us with five distinct tales each dealing with a distinct brand of threat and menace, from demonic entities, to sinister cults, to the considerably more grounded horror of what to do if your home comes under attack, or if you accidentally hit someone with your car. As with any anthology movie, there are some stories which feel a little insubstantial, and others which you’d half like to see play out at greater length and in more detail – but they’re all succinct enough to keep boredom from ever setting in.
Just so I don’t spoil all the surprises for the uninitiated reader, I’ll avoid going into specifics on the individual stories (that’s always the dilemna when reviewing an anthology movie: whether to break it up story by story, or give a more general overview). Suffice to say, Southbound is the most fun I’ve had with a portmanteau for a while. As the tales are unified by setting if not theme, there’s a similar aesthetic overlying the entire enterprise, and not unlike Trick’r’Treat (or other non-horror anthology movies, like Pulp Fiction or Go) the tales sometimes overlap in surprising and effective ways.
Southbound also contrasts nicely with a lot of contemporary anthology horror movies because it never seems that the filmmakers are trying to out-fucked-up each other. Anyone who’s ever seen the V/H/S or ABCs of Death films will most likely struggle to recall much in terms of story detail, instead reflecting on a wall-to-wall cacophony of naked bodies and bodily fluids of all description. Nothing wrong with any of that, of course, but when it’s piled on in such abundance it can get a little numbing. No danger of that with Southbound; all concerned here are far more concerned with building atmosphere and tension, with the real shocker moments coming through unexpected plot developments and moments of surrealism. As such, it’s no surprise the film has been likened to The Twilight Zone. Of course, this is not to say that gore’s off the table completely; there are a few suitably grisly moments which certainly earn that 18 certificate. Sex never really enters the picture though, and one gratuitous bra shot is as close as we get to nudity. (Oh, what are you complaining about? You’re on the internet, it’s not like you can’t find tits anywhere.)
Okay, so I know I said I’d avoid specifics on the stories, but I will say this much… David Bruckner’s hit-and-almost-run story is to my mind the most effective story, whilst Patrick Hovarth’s is probably the most throwaway, but all of them look and sound great, with strong performances throughout (as well as Fessenden, other actors with notable horror credentials include more V/H/S veterans in Chad Villella and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, and Fabianne Therese of Starry Eyes and John Dies at the End). But Radio Silence’s opening and closing stories are the ones that boast the most memorable imagery of the film. It’s faintly ironic that this is a production of the same core team behind V/H/S, as the winged skeletal phantoms we see here (remarkable CGI work, given this clearly wasn’t an especially big-budget affair) are clearly reminiscent of the spectral figure from the posters for the ABCs of Death movies…
Southbound is released to DVD, Blu-ray and digital download on 8th August, from Studiocanal.