Three masked men force their way into the home of a middle class family
to - have some violent fun. ... and that's pretty much as much
as I'm entitled to give away of the film's plot as per agreement. But
what I can say: Hate Crime is a pretty powerful film, intense in
its rawness and its insistence on doing (almost) all in one single take -
but what often seems a useless gimmick employed by an overconfident
filmmaker does actually have a narrative reason here. Furthermore, while
everything looks intentionally chaotic on screen (to mirror the chaotic
on-screen goings-on of course), everything seems carefully planned as
director James Cullen Bressack knows how to keep his camera on the action
and tell his story. Stistically and on a story level, the film is of
course reminiscent of grindhouse home invasion classics like Last
House on the Left and House
at the Edge of the Park, with its outbursts of extreme violence
and its relentlessness when it comes to putting its protagonists through
all sorts of torture - even if the ending of Hate Crime veers off
the beaten track of your typical home invasion film and actually tries to
make a point. As powerful as it
is though, Hate Crime is not without its flaws, the intensity of
the situation and the (narrative) insistance to telling this story in real
time leaves the characters very little room to develop, plus the fact that
most of the dialogue is shouted and screamed (again, a narrative
necessity) does get on one's nerves after a while (more than the on-screen
violence, actually). That said, the whole
ensemble cast is pretty good, and you certainly can't blame the film for
not being intense enough, quite the contrary - so yeah, gorehounds and
grindhouse fans as well as filmfans with more refined tastes who
appreciate the film as an experiment will find plenty to love in this
film. Recommended, actually -
but nor for the faint-hearted.
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